“Central planning is a bureaucratic nightmare” ~ Hayek (get)
Even I couldn’t log on to Healthcare.gov ~ Obamacare contractor (see)
No one even considered the scenario we are now seeing: a partially working system in which it is difficult to sign up but not impossible. This means that the most motivated consumers (the sickest) are likely to persevere in creating accounts, while the younger and healthier are more likely to skip an unpleasant process and risk a minimal fine. “If they don’t get the necessary volume and demographic mix in the exchanges,” Yuval Levin of National Affairs told me, “it could set off a catastrophic adverse selection spiral that would not only render the exchanges inoperable but badly damage our large health care systems.”
But the failed rollout has already raised ideological issues of broader significance. It has reinforced a widely held, pre-existing belief that government-run health systems are bureaucratic nightmares. And it has added credence to the libertarian argument that some human systems are too complex to be effectively managed. Perhaps the problem with Obamacare is not failed leadership, but the whole project of putting a federal agency, 55 contractors and 500 million lines of software code in charge of a health system intended to cover millions of Americans.
I am not a libertarian who argues against the need for programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. But Friedrich Hayek has this much going for him: He understood that the challenge of technocratic planning is always limited information. “The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.”
Via NewsBusters:
MSNBC’s Chris Jansing brought software expert Luke Chung onto Thursday’s Jansing & Co. to analyze the federal government’s troubled healthcare.gov website. Chung, the founder and president of software and database programming company FMS, served up a scathing indictment of the website that left Jansing reeling at certain points during the interview. [See video below the break. MP3 audio here.]
Jansing started by asking how complicated it was to get healthcare.gov up and running. Chung was very frank with her: “I don’t know why they made it so complicated. This really shouldn’t be that difficult.” Jansing fumbled around, talking about other countries and states that have launched similar programs before playing administration advocate…
[….]
Later, Chung eviscerated CGI, the IT company hired by the government to develop healthcare.gov: “This was built, I think, by people who were never paid before to create software. I think they just got out of school or something. You know, these government contractors, they win these contracts and then they’re incentivized to deliver the cheapest people possible to meet the minimum requirements.”
Chung bluntly put the website problems in perspective: “I mean, this is not rocket science. We’re not curing cancer, we’re not providing any health care, we’re not even providing health insurance. We’re filling out a paper form. Not that hard.”
Via MoonBat:
HotAir has this:
There’s a growing consensus on the mid- to late-November time frame by which the Obama administration really, really needs to have ObamaCare’s online portal running smoothly to avoid inducing more death-spiral risks and subsequent industry panic, and all of their plans for public outreach and directing people to call centers and whatnot is only going to get them so far.
“Tech surge” or no tech surge, CNN reports that still more experts and computer engineers are piling on to the suggestion that fixing HealthCare.Gov’s major problems before the end of 2013 just isn’t a feasible task, and that rebuilding the system from scratch would be the administration’s easiest and safest bet:
After assessing the website, Dave Kennedy, the CEO of information-security company Trusted Sec, estimates that about 20% of Healthcare.gov needs to be rewritten. With a whopping 500 million lines of code, according to a recent New York Times report, Kennedy believes fixing the site would probably take six months to a year.
… Nish Bhalla, CEO of information-security firm Security Compass, said it “does not sound realistic at all” that Healthcare.gov will be fully operational before that point.
“We don’t even know where all of the problems lie, so how can we solve them?” Bhalla said. “It’s like a drive-by shooting: You’re going fast and you might hit it, you might miss it. But you can’t fix what you can’t identify.” …
“Projects that are done rapidly usually have a lot of [repetitive] code,” said Arron Kallenberg, a software engineer and tech entrepreneur. “So when you have a problem, instead of debugging something in a single location, you’re tracking it down all through the code base.”
A whopping 500 million lines of code is “so excessive,” says Kennedy, and that a more normal number for a project like the ObamaCare site would lie somewhere in the range of 25 million to 50 million. Dayum.