Failed Healthcare Site

It's all smoke and mirrors,Wonder what is being hidden behind this Obama care facade.

Besides the usual corruption, I mean.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/canadian-officials-fired-it-firm-behind-troubled-obamacare-website/article/2537101

"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." - Jean Baptiste Alphonse Karr (1808-90).

It was bungled pretty badly.  Even as someone who thinks the ACA is a net positive (though it's bad for me on a personal level), I'll admit it was bungled.

This is what we get for so many idiots voting for "small government," pro-privatization candidates who support outsourcing government projects to private contractors. :/  Unfortunately its become ubiquitous among candidates on 'both' sides (yes, I vote for third party candidates but the vast majority of Americans ignore them and even scoff at those of us who vote for the candidate we think best suits us instead of limiting ourselves to 'lesser of two evils'), and the results are the same ad infinitum -- contractor executives get wealthy, rarely are they held accountable for shoddiness in implementation or exceeding the contract price they promised in the bidding process they could keep, and they always look for whatever corners they can cut to lower their actual costs so they can remain the low bidder and still funnel gargantuan amounts of taxpayer dollars to their hands.

"Private" (corporate) entities are interested in one thing:  concentrating wealth in the hands of their executives and already wealthiest shareholders.  Any claims to the contrary (things like 'customer-focused,' 'quality-focused' or the like) are meaningless, unsubstantive sales pitches.  If they were truly customer-, product- or service-focused above their own pay, they would not give themselves a year-over-year raise percentage several times that of their actual production or quality control folk, nor pay their production or quality control folk less than their sales folk.  Placing the greatest monetary focus on salesmen more means squeezing more out of the quality they have instead of focusing on better quality products or services.  This is a small part of the reason why "privatization" diverges from the best interests of the nation and even the economy as a whole.  This has proven to be the case over and over, especially since the U.S. moved from being largely agrarian to industrialist-capitalistic starting around the mid to late 19th century.  Hard lessons were learned early about the tyranny of unchecked capitalistic power, but over time this has become a lost lesson.

It's a new system, bugs need to be worked out, let's wait until the dust settles. I hope it works.

First Omama car was just passed about 3 years ago so I doubt they decided to make a web site years ago. If memory serves me right I think the web site was supposed to be done sometime in 2011

After it was passed, bids went out for web designers or for a better choice of words IT firms to build the site. So that was all in the last three years.

I sure wouldn't say it was an unlimited budget as they took the lowest bidder. I would bet that with little time left anyone took the time to really check out who they awarded the contract to. One of the problems with always taking the lowest bit.

I have been part of bids for $100,000.00 max. On this bit I saw one for $97.000, one for $93,000, and one for $81,000. It was awarded to the low bit and six months later there was all kinds of legal problems. So sometimes taking the lowest bit gets you in trouble but the Government is good for that and also the States, Counties, etc.

You want to take the lowest bid than do your homework and check out the company real good before an award is given.

Don't ya just love how some people think if you have a different opinion than they have or vote differently than they you are idiots. Its a good thing they don't have any power to force their beliefs on the rest of us.

I think the biggest issue was not enough bandwidth. But that in it's self shows short sightedness. I don't think they thought so many people were going to hit the site at one time. The problem is we will never know the truth about what happened. it will be some big secret. Need to know only lol. 

Just chalk it up to another government mess up, they do that a lot you know.

I remember when this site was re-done. There were some pretty good glitches. Even now there are glitches now and then here.

You mean here....as in 'right here'?

We're proud of our glitches....builds character...;)

Yep. Good old WC glitches. Like the one where it takes forever to load any WC page no matter what you do?

LOL

The Republicans really missed a big opportunity to get their one-year delay.  If they had been a little smarter and punted on the whole shutdown stuff, they would have come off as reasonable, and this would have been the big news of the past two weeks.  Then, they probably would have gotten their one-year delay of the mandate.

Instead, they really shot themselves in the foot.

Personally, I think the failures with healthcare.gov have been underreported, and this is coming from someone who supports the ACA as a net positive despite it being a net negative for me. 

I'm not all that surprised if the Democrats actually worked a bid system for the site. I remember the Iraq war when Democrats like Hillary and others were bellyaching that Bush gave no bid contract to Halliburton.. There were only two companies in the world who could have bid... Halliburton and some French company. Why should we have given the French such a contract when they didn't even lift a finger to help militarily? So I don't find it as astounding that the Obama admin would contract such a site to the Canadians. I would just take a guess that all that info on the lives of Americans such as SS numbers and their entire health history was going to fall in the hands of the Canadians? McAfee has been in the news calling the site a security nightmare. I don't see why Obama doesn't just make a deal to include a year delay of the individual mandate when his website is irrevocably broken anyway. The whole thing is just bizarre. Not nearly as bizarre as spending lots of money to barricade veterans out of their own memorials.

"There isn't any way such incompetence is achievable"

Yeah, you wouldn't think so, but...........

The site was tested before the roll out and failed.

Obummer says call the toll free number: 1-800-318-2596. If ya get through they send ya back to the web site.

But like you said it could be intentional.

Was never going to happen.  There was no way on earth that the President was going to go to the opposition party, people who he (or his proxies) literally calls terrorists and anarchists and fringe lunatics to admit that his signature achievement wasn't ready and ask for their votes to delay it to give it time to get fixed.  They'd have given him the delay, but he never would have asked.  That's not his way.  It's not his method of politics.  

There was no chance in hell he was going to initiate that process.  

And that's assuming that the knowledge of the impending implosion was actually making its way through the barriers of personality between the implementation team and the WH senior staff. 

Would love to hear in which alternate universe that could have happened.  In the one we presently inhabit, there was no such 'opportunity' to be missed - the currently accepted definition of 'reasonable' is 'give the Democrats everything they want'.  No chance in Hell BO would have agreed to a delay.

A perfectly functioning website on Day 1 would not have put a bit of lipstick on the Obamacare pig.  People seem to gloss over the fact that it's mandatory - the huzzah's for the website crashes as 'evidence of the popularity' of Obamacare are nauseating.

Of course, the vast majority of the time contracts come in on time and on or under budget.  But don't let this catastrophe pass without somehow using it to bash the very people who fought tooth and nail against this particular disaster.  No ax to grind there at all, huh?

Take it from someone who spent a decade working on both sides of this problem, the US government doesn't function without contractors.  There is no scenario where the government is capable of doing everything it needs to do (however you define what it "needs" to do) without contractors.  Our military can't operate.  Nevermind the production of war materials, our military can't fight without contractors on the ground side-by-side with soldiers.  The State Department can't carry out its mission.  Energy, Education, HHS, the 3 letter agencies.  None of them are functional without contractors. 

Modern technology is simply too complicated for the government to maintain everything in house at the resource levels it needs exactly where it needs them when it needs them.  The flex up and down would make it impossible to retain talent without paying exorbitant salaries.

As for your second paragraph...every contract I ever saw, on either side of the process, was Cost-Plus-Incentive where both the award fee and the incentives were tied to performance metrics and cost saving targets both set by the government.  The key is to align the incentives with what benefits to government project and to have good project management on the government side.  In the case of Obamacare they likely had neither and they were unwilling to delay the project to give it time to recover (for entirely political reasons).  But the failure of one high profile project doesn't call the effectiveness of contracting in general into question. 

Until the 'kinks' get worked out, just call 1-800-F1U-CKYO.  The helpful operator will give you the address of a special website where you can get ACA help: healthcare.gov.

As far as the site being a clever, intentional 'faux' failure as a ploy by Barry's minions goes, same thing applies as did to the Truther theories - they're not competent enough to pull it off.

I agree.  I think the ploy for failure to push us towards single payer idea is nonsense.  

Public backlash against a failed ACA launch is somehow going to make the public even more trusting that the government can manage a bigger system containing more of our personal information?  The American public is dumb, but that may a bridge too far.  

You hit the point better than I did - why would this clusterfark persuade us that single-payer would be the solution?  United Healthcare would love to get that contract, though, so anything is possible.  Don't forget, their CEO once got a half billion dollar bonus.

It may not matter what 'we the people' think of it all, once Obama & United's people get behind closed doors, something not so good could happen.

No doubt for helping people get the care they needed. 

All they needed to do was pick ("incentive") companies which launched highly efficient websites to bid on the project. They couldn't even do that.

How'd you know?  LOL