9 thoughts on “Want to buy health insurance?”

  1. Oh. my. god.
    I laughed out loud for a solid minute. I swear. This is going to be a bigger black eye for B0 than anything the Rethugs could do to him.

    Three people write a good, functional web site in two weeks.

    Sadly, the Repubs are really going to go nuts with the-gubmint-can’t-do-anything meme, which isn’t the point.
    The point is the government could have easily done this right but for some reason didn’t. Why?

  3. Now where’s that article from a couple weeks back on government IT contracting?
    Someone in government wants an IT application. It could be anything, any product anymore, but ‘IT’ is a great example. No one in the agency doing the acquisition actually knows how to do ‘IT,’ so no one knows how to even scope the work needed. So they put out a request for proposal to which tons of companies respond. If you don’t know how to do something, it seems impossible and will probably take a long time, so you expect long duration, high dollar proposals. Big companies are preferred, because “bigger is better,” right? Their people wear suits and ties to meetings and “suits and ties” mean professional, right? They’ve previously received millions of dollars in contracts, cause millions received means they’re “established and successful,” right? And to top it off, Senator Blimp is so pleased with these guys that he put money in the appropriation for the task ONLY if these guys get the contract. So, what the fuck, a contract is awarded to Engulf and Devour IT Solutions, a year passes and a million is spent.
    So it’s time to see the first deliverable and the suits and ties turn up . . . with a thumb drive. That thumb drive contains NOT your app, not even as much as a log in, but a PowerPoint presentation on what the site would look like . . . if it worked. Well fuck, you’ve sunk a million bucks already, better dig up another and get them to finish the damn thing. A few iterations of this process and you get to HealthCare.gov solution. More years have gone by and more millions have been spent for something that’s clunky and nothing like you thought it would be when you started out.
    But what the fuck do you know, you’re not a programmer and the suits and ties tell you that the fraggle algorithm for the beta search function was extremely complex, never been done, you don’t know what you’re asking. Well, in fact, no we didn’t, cause Congress and the White House tell us that contracting out for people who do know what we want ‘saves’ the government SO MUCH MONEY (how much? we don’t know, but a lot we’re told).
    Then the next fucking week you see a spot on TV where three geeks working from a laptop on a fucking plywood table in an undecorated store front came up with a better system in five days for the cost of a few trips to fucking Starbucks and delivery pizza!

  4. Well, to be exact, those three are professional programmers so if they charged their usual rate it might cost as much as several thousands of dollars. (^v^)

  5. To be fair, it does not have the identity verification part or the income verification part which are supposed to be the most complex aspects of the government website.

    But it does give you a quick approximation of what it is going to cost. Also the premiums are different ($200 less) than on ehealthinsurance.com.

  7. Now we’re buying into the anti-government crapola! These programmers did not build a website from scratch. They accessed the government’s programming and re-stacked it to get the consumer to the price information directly. That may be a valuable add on, but you can’t qualify or register on this site. It is an aggregation of links. You also can’t access any state that has its own exchange. They have created a window into healthcare.gov. Claiming that this is somehow comparable to establishing the on-line exchange is about as ill informed as last night’ claim by Brokaw on Letterman that any seventh grader could have programmed the website. No and no.

  8. Iless, yes, the site doesn’t interface with the id and income databases, which simplifies matters.

    BUT

    The healthcare.gov web site itself, the part the three-coders-and-a-laptop replaced, could not stand up to any sort of traffic. It was not due to unexpected volume. Healthcare.gov started crashing for people almost immediately and some of the reasons are already known, such as excessive numbers of scripts calling the server on each page load. That’s just super-bad design. I’m a complete amateur, and even I know not to do that.

    And, yes, they left out whole parts of the site. That’s the whole point. Those are the parts you don’t need if you’re trying to comparison shop. The government could have been customer-oriented like that. It could have done a staged rollout. Phase 1: still need to do a lot of backend testing — sorry — but here, let’s get started giving you the price information. It would have worked much better. That’s what these programmers proved to the nth degree.

    It also puts big neon lights around the question of why nobody in government could ask these questions. Back in July when I heard their first real test of the system would be completed about two days before rollout, I knew (me, the rank amateur, see above) that it was going to be an epic disaster. That’s a management failure much more than a software failure.

    And that doesn’t bode well for the rest of this thing. If the only problem was Federal IT, that can be worked around eventually. If the problem is people at the top who don’t care what kind of half-baked insurance they toss out there, then our problems are only beginning.

  9. I just figured it would be helpful to people who can’t get through. It’s not buying into anything to let people know they can get an idea of their cost here, and buy it over the phone.

Comments are closed.