[ArtK78]

In my opinion, it would have been far more surprising if the rollout of Obamacare went off without a hitch. It is unusual for a website or any involved program (and I don't mean computer program) to be implemented without initial hiccups. So the fact that there are problems in the first few weeks doesn't surprise me at all.

The problems will be fixed. The real test of Obamacare is how well it works after the initial technical problems are behind us. From what I have heard, the initial reaction to the substance of the program is quite favorable.

[kenberg]

Without a hitch would indeed have been surprising. It presumably would have been particularly surprising to Kathleen Sebelius who was given detailed descriptions of the many very substantial flaws.


Some years back, actually quite a few years back, something similar happened where I wroked. A much smaller system, rolled out with great fanfare, and great failure. "It was working fine". "Too many people were using it at once". "People were not reading the directins properly" etc. Finally someone realized the system was not working properly. Really? What a guy!

That there should be glitches is to be expected, certainly that is so. As I get it, "glitch", or "hitch", is not the word that comes to mind for people who actually have to try and cope with it.

[y66]

It would be extremely cool if Kathleen Sibelius & Co. could turn this around. If it were just a hardware scaling problem, they might be able to pull it off. But it sounds like it's way more serious than that. This looks like it will go down in history as the Titanic of web launches.

[ArtK78]

y66, on 2013-October-22, 10:08, said:

It would be extremely cool if Kathleen Sibelius & Co. could turn this around. If it were just a hardware scaling problem, they might be able to pull it off. But it sounds like it's way more serious than that. This looks like it will go down in history as the Titanic of web launches.

Seems like a particularly inappropriate metaphor. The Titanic sailed from England on a smooth journey initially until it ran into the iceberg, which proved fatal. The web launch was rocky from the beginning - but not fatal - and, hopefully, the problems will be corrected and it will be smooth sailing thereafter.

[kenberg]

Ah yes, Kathleen not Katherine. I fixed it. Seb with and e, not Sib with an i though.

At
http://www.washingto...src=nl_politics
and elsewhere we find Obama saying:

“There’s no sugarcoating it: The Web site is too slow; people have been getting stuck during the application process,” he said at a White House event.

Too slow? Is that what people have been saying? I have been hearing "I can't get on", "It mishandles the data" and other such things.

The lead paragraph from the story above says
"Days before the launch of President Obama’s online health ­insurance marketplace, government officials and contractors tested a key part of the Web site to see whether it could handle tens of thousands of consumers at the same time. It crashed after a simulation in which just a few hundred people tried to log on simultaneously."

"There is no sugarcoating it, the cabins on the Titanic are too damp", to use your analogy.

[PassedOut]

kenberg, on 2013-October-22, 11:57, said:

“There’s no sugarcoating it: The Web site is too slow; people have been getting stuck during the application process,” he said at a White House event.

I don't doubt that folks have had problems. I avoided the site the first couple of weeks (as I do with all new sites), then set up an account pretty easily without any particular slowdowns or problems. That's not to say that I won't run into a problem in the future, but I wonder how many folks complaining about the website's problems have actually experienced them personally.

[kenberg]

PassedOut, on 2013-October-22, 12:38, said:

I don't doubt that folks have had problems. I avoided the site the first couple of weeks (as I do with all new sites), then set up an account pretty easily without any particular slowdowns or problems. That's not to say that I won't run into a problem in the future, but I wonder how many folks complaining about the website's problems have actually experienced them personally.

That is very good to hear. I don't need to use it, or at least I don't think that I do, but I know several who will need to use it. The reports I have heard have not been encouraging.

So you are right, I have not had direct experience here. There was a discussion recently on the local public television station (WETA) with some wh had tried it. As I recall, only one successfully completed the entire venture, and that was after a lot of difficulty.

It seems to me that if they knew there were problems and knew what they were, it would have been very senssible to just hold it up a bit. That way they would have free access for fixing it. This way they shut it down for a few hours at a time, then bring it back up, then shut it down and so on. Seems dumb to me.

[PassedOut]

kenberg, on 2013-October-22, 13:13, said:

That is very good to hear. I don't need to use it, or at least I don't think that I do, but I know several who will need to use it. The reports I have heard have not been encouraging.

Based on the news reports, I had expected problems. I'm used to news reports being sensationalized, but still expected to see some sort of bug or unsatisfactory performance. Was a bit surprised at how easily and smoothly everything went for me. That's not to say, of course, that I won't be finding myself swearing a blue streak at it sometime in the future.

[ArtK78]

kenberg, on 2013-October-22, 13:13, said:

That is very good to hear. I don't need to use it, or at least I don't think that I do, but I know several who will need to use it. The reports I have heard have not been encouraging.

So you are right, I have not had direct experience here. There was a discussion recently on the local public television station (WETA) with some wh had tried it. As I recall, only one successfully completed the entire venture, and that was after a lot of difficulty.

It seems to me that if they knew there were problems and knew what they were, it would have been very senssible to just hold it up a bit. That way they would have free access for fixing it. This way they shut it down for a few hours at a time, then bring it back up, then shut it down and so on. Seems dumb to me.

Dumb seems to be par for the course in web sites. Let me pass along a recent experience.

My girlfriend uses Yahoo mail for her e-mail. Recently, Yahoo changed the appearance and functionality of its e-mail site. Not only do users have to get used to a different appearance for no obvious reason, but some of the functions that they used in the past are no longer available. My girlfriend complained to me about it, telling me that some things she used to be able to do to handle a bunch of e-mails at once she now has to do one at a time. I didn't follow exactly what she was trying to do, but the intent was clear - the new setup causes more work, not less. Furthermore, I saw a note on Yahoo about the changes to the mail site, and Yahoo essentially said get used to it because they were not going back.

I only use Yahoo mail for my fantasy football league, which is on Yahoo. Since we started this season of fantasy football, my Yahoo mail account has been disabled 3 times. I could not reactivate my account using any of the tools online - I had to call Yahoo help by phone. They gave me the e-mail address of Yahoo technical support. In the first two instances, this resulted in a quick fix. This last time I received e-mail responses essentially saying it was a temporary problem and it would resolve itself. My response to that was I told them where to put their temporary problem and to fix my account, which they did. So, at least for now, I have access to my Yahoo e-mail account.

The bottom line is that it is not necessarily that easy to get a website to work properly, especially when you have a lot of people trying to use it at the same time. The Obamacare website is brand new - it stands to reason that there would be some problems. The Yahoo e-mail site has been up and running for decades. And they are still having problems.

[PassedOut]

ArtK78, on 2013-October-22, 13:27, said:

The bottom line is that it is not necessarily that easy to get a website to work properly, especially when you have a lot of people trying to use it at the same time. The Obamacare website is brand new - it stands to reason that there would be some problems. The Yahoo e-mail site has been up and running for decades. And they are still having problems.

Still, the fact that lots of commercial websites have problems is not all that comforting for folks who need healthcare. I do expect better from the US government than from corporations, and I hope folks get the service they need. (Maybe they took the site up too quickly because all of the news at the time was about the government shutdown. I'm not a politician, so often can't figure out what goes through their heads, if anything.)

[Winstonm]

PassedOut, on 2013-October-22, 13:21, said:

I won't be finding myself swearing a blue streak at it sometime in the future.

That's too bad because it's now covered by healthcare.

[blackshoe]

Its proper name is "Seppuku". "Hara-kiri" (literally, "cutting the belly") is a vulgarism.

[kenberg]

blackshoe, on 2013-October-22, 18:20, said:

Its proper name is "Seppuku". "Hara-kiri" (literally, "cutting the belly") is a vulgarism.

Nothing wrong with a little vulgarity now and then

[y66]

Rahm Emanuel's brother Ezekiel has some suggestions for fixing healthcare.gov in today's paper.

Quote

The president should create a new position: an independent chief executive of the federal exchange. On Tuesday, the White House announced that the economic adviser Jeffrey D. Zients will oversee the “tech surge” in the short term. Mr. Zients is a great manager and was a health care industry consultant, but he is also about to take on an important job as director of the National Economic Council. We need someone who can not just begin the repair process, but also run and refine the exchange’s operations for at least the next two years.

Quote

Second, the system needs to borrow from other exchanges. While the federal exchange has been a fiasco, many state exchanges have been working well since they launched earlier this month. One of the assignments for the students in my health policy class at the University of Pennsylvania this semester was to window-shop for insurance policies on the California exchange. They found the site easy to use and said there were many choices and the prices were competitive, even before subsidies. These students are the key demographic — young and healthy — that the sites need if they are going to succeed. Mr. Zients and the new C.E.O. should be looking carefully at the California, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Maryland, New York and any other successful state-run exchanges, and seeing which aspects can be adopted into the federal exchange, without reinventing it wholesale.

Quote

Next, the administration needs to be candid with the public. Given the disappointing rollout of the Web site, Americans are justifiably suspicious. Starting now, the administration needs to initiate a concerted effort to win back the public’s trust. There should be twice-weekly briefings that feature honest and complete descriptions of both the problems and solutions that the tech team is working on — in all the gory detail. We need to hear from those “best and brightest” experts whom President Obama has enlisted in the tech surge. Transparency is the only way to convince the American people that the situation is under control.

Quote

Fourth, delay what can be delayed to focus on the absolute top priority: the customer shopping experience, especially the ability to compare coverage, deductibles, co-pays, subsidized premiums and other information side by side. But there are certain parts of the exchange that can be postponed. For instance, the site doesn’t have to provide the enrollment data of each individual to insurance companies right away. That could be delayed until mid-November.

Quote

Finally, once the Web site is working reasonably well, there needs to be an enormous P.R. campaign to engage those young invincibles.

[blackshoe]

"The president should create a new position"

Of course. Can't ever have enough bureaucrats, can we?

[y66]

As Fred Brooks pointed out in The Mythical Man Month before most of the guys who built healthcare.gov were born, "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later".

Quote

Brooks' observations are based on his experiences at IBM while managing the development of OS/360. He had added more programmers to a project falling behind schedule, a decision that he would later conclude had, counter-intuitively, delayed the project even further. He also made the mistake of asserting that one project — writing an ALGOL compiler — would require six months, regardless of the number of workers involved (it required longer). The tendency for managers to repeat such errors in project development led Brooks to quip that his book is called "The Bible of Software Engineering", because "everybody quotes it, some people read it, and a few people go by it."

The reason you need to add a guy like Jeffrey Zients is you need someone on the project who is old enough to have read and understood what Brooks and others learned on that project.

[kenberg]

The key points of the Ezekiel Emmanuel piece are
a. He acknowledges that there is a substantial problem.
b. He examines how this came about.
c. He proposes how to fix it.

This is good.


Of course there will be glitches, of course there will be some issues that are quite thorny. But I, and I expect most people, like to see something along the lines of a., b. and c. above when this occurs.

Advances in medical care have been truly astounding in the last couple of decades. When I was young my interests were primarily mathematics and physics. If I were young today, I think I would look at mathematics (some things never change) and biology/medicine. These changes require a changes in the structure. I had pneumonia in 1945 or so. Dr. Setzer, our family doc, came out, prescribed some medicine, told me to stay in bed, and then we all hoped for the best. Yes it worked out but I imagine mothers today appreciate the greater hope provided by medical advances.

My health has been good, mostly, so my experience is limited. But I did have some bureaucratic issues with Medicare a while back. But I have had similar issues with insurance companies. The medical world, and the world in general, has simply become more complex.

Despite, or maybe because of, all of the complexity it is very important to me that I have a substantial say in my medical treatment. This gets tricky. It's tricky with Medicare, it will be tricky with Obamacare, but it would also be tricky with neither program in place. We need the most talented people we can find at the helm, and we need transparency (often claimed, seldom provided) and scrutiny. The Emmanuel article fits right into my thinking on this.

[y66]

Hmmm. I wonder where all those multiple enrollments on healthcare.gov are coming from?

Sebelius and Zients are probably on there way over to kenberg's house now.

[barmar]

kenberg, on 2013-October-22, 13:13, said:

It seems to me that if they knew there were problems and knew what they were, it would have been very senssible to just hold it up a bit. That way they would have free access for fixing it. This way they shut it down for a few hours at a time, then bring it back up, then shut it down and so on. Seems dumb to me.

I wonder if they might have done that if the launch hadn't coincided with the government shutdown. They may have put on rose-colored glasses and hoped that it would go well enough to provide a political win. Unfortunately, it didn't -- so the Republicans looked bad for shutting down the government, and the Decocrats got egg on their faces for launching a broken site.

When the site first launched, and there were reports of it failing, they were claiming that it just couldn't handle the load. That happens -- apparently they expected X number of people to to try it right away, and there were several times that many.

But reports I've heard since then indicate that it's much more than just an overload problem, there's also lots of incomplete or incorrect data. E.g. sometimes a spouse will be reported to the insurance company as a child.

http://www.newser.co...es-as-kids.html

The Daily Show mentioned that less than 10% of people who have attempted to enroll have been successful.

[barmar]

PassedOut, on 2013-October-22, 13:38, said:

I do expect better from the US government than from corporations

You're kidding, right?

Corporations have incentive to get things right -- if their services don't work, they lose money and can go out of business. Governments don't have much to lose.

I may be a Democrat, but I still know that private industry is usually more efficient and productive than the public sector. There are just some services that are hard for private businesses to provide (there's no profit in fire-fighting or welfare, for instance), and we need governments to do them.