Anatomy Of A Crash

A lot of my readers, like me, work in IT. 

And if you’re in the Twin Cities and are in the IT contracting community, you may well have heard the rumblings from the Minnesota Health Insurance Exchange project, either at hire time or from people involved in the development process.

Capsule Summary:  It’s been a Bulgarian Goat Rodeo.

And it reflects how things have been going in most every other state involved in the Obamacare Exchanges, and of course at the Federal level.

Megan McArdle breaks down the federal registration site meltdown at a level that’ll make sense to all of you bit-chasers and code-monkeys out there. 

To me, the UX guy?  

That’ll be worth a post on its own.

38 thoughts on “Anatomy Of A Crash

  1. LOL, maybe they hired the Romney IT people; presumably if they are still working at all, they work cheap.

    Keep hoping, and the right wing talking heads can keep exaggerating the problems. The reality is that if there had been less sabotage from the ideological extremists on the right, this would work even better. But given the success of this kind of insurance program elsewhere, notably Switzerland and the Netherlands, it will work here too. It is a solid idea, well-tested. Your area of expertise is IT; mine is insurance – from an insurance perspective this is a good plan.

    And the right has NOTHING as an alternative of any merit.

    With six months for enrollment, and the increasing numbers of people who like the health care reform, as the few glitches are worked out, it will be one more hugely popular advancement in the Democrat’s column, and the conservatives will look even worse for taking the unpopular step of shutting down the government.

    The glitches will be temporary; the egg on the faces of the right will endure much longer.

  2. I am wildly enthusiastic about having all my private data being thrown about on a website that can be at best described as an alpha release!

    I was shocked that anyone thought the government could build an IT project in 3 years, much less one that has the data volume and security concerns that 0bamacare has. Obviously the history of the government and ANY IT project has been forgotten. The IT guys at the IRS take 3 months to change anything in their tables and anyone thinks that they’ll build a whole new system in 3.5 years?!

  3. DG,

    Hey! Haven’t seen you in forever!

    Keep hoping, and the right wing talking heads can keep exaggerating the problems.

    Really? There’s been some success somewhere? Do tell!

    The reality is that if there had been less sabotage from the ideological extremists on the right, this would work even better.

    a) It couldn’t work any worse.
    b) Please document “Right-wing sabotage” that’s affected the software development process. Consider this a FACT CHECK.

    But given the success of this kind of insurance program elsewhere, notably Switzerland and the Netherlands, it will work here too.

    This program is “like” the Swiss or Dutch (or German) programs only in very high-level terms.

    mine is insurance – from an insurance perspective this is a good plan.

    OK – we’ll come back to your expertise in insurance perhaps later. This post is about the IT side of the project.

    And “debacle” isn’t an overly strong word.

    And the right has NOTHING as an alternative of any merit.

    Sure we do.

    With six months for enrollment, and the increasing numbers of people who like the health care reform

    So now you’re clairvoyant. Hm.

    it will be one more hugely popular advancement in the Democrat’s column,

    Or at least that’s how the media and the left’s noise machine will relentlessly present it, fact be damned.

    The glitches will be temporary; the egg on the faces of the right will endure much longer

    That’s your prediction, huh?

    Hey – I know we’ve been through this before, but I’d really like an answer.

    You said Tony Cornish’s “Stand your Ground” bill was “crap legislation”. After months and months of patient waiting for your elaboration, you posted a link to a case in Texas that was neither germane to Minnesota’s law and, as I showed, actually reinforced the Minnesota case.

    Please favor us with a proximate defense of your statement in your own words.

    Thanks!

  4. I think that McCardle’s friend has it right, this is a DB issue. While the friend says it is likely the result of poor design, it may be the requirements were poorly written. Usually there are tradeoffs involved between performance and data integrity or scalability. A poor tradeoff may have been written into the design requirements as a cost saving measure.
    It wasn’t essential that online signup and shopping work out the gate.
    Security is going to be a very big deal with this.

  5. It is worth noting again:

    0bumblerCare toll free number is 1-800-318-2596. Throw out “1″ and you get 1-800-FUCKYO.

    ‘nuf said.

  6. Keep hoping, and the right wing talking heads can keep exaggerating the problems.

    Hmmm, like California overstating number of hits by 3.5 million?

    And while you are doing homework, DogPile, please do not forget to point out where Pinal county borders with a foreign country.

  7. Obamacare is nothing like the German system. Utterly different.
    It’s closer to the Swiss system, at a ‘high level’, but Switzerland is a very different country than the United States. To begin with, Switzerland is land-locked, mountainous country in the middle of Europe with a population of only eight million people.

  8. Hey Dog Gone, it’s nice to see an old friend return to SITD. I’m glad you stopped by to reassure us how well things are working. Or will be working. Soon. Probably.

    I just calendared a reminder for April 3, 2014 “Check success of wildly popular, glitch-free Obamacare, report to SITD.” See you then!
    .

  9. Joe Doakes, I think that you are using the wrong metric.
    Obama and his ilk don’t give a damn about whether the system works, insures more people, or delivers health care at all. Look at Obama’s history, he got the nod to run for IIlinois senate district 13 for one reason — When he was a community organizer, his operation registered hundreds of thousands of new democrat voters.
    The sole purpose of Obamacare is to create and sustain a democrat majority in national politics. As a voter, you must learn that your health and the health of your loved ones requires you to vote democratic.The sooner conservatives realize this, the better.

  10. Speaking as a quality and reliability engineer, I can state confidently that the procedures for establishing a healthcare exchange ought to have involved a lot of FMEAs (one for functionality, one for capacity, one for security, etc..), as well as a number of checkpoints (in military contracting, it’s called source or first article inspections) where the integrity of a system is intact. In general, such a system–which the government (NASA/DOD) invented–ought to have flagged the problems.

    To make it doubly inexcusable, bragging about insuring 30 million people ought to give a hint as to what the “elephant test” (think the old Timex ads from the 1970s) ought to have been, and to make it triply inexcusable, the math for doing quality and reliability engineering is really similar to the math actuaries use for insurance.

    Unless, of course, Powhatan is correct, and I can’t really argue with him. I heard Obama registered 50,000 voters in Burr Oak alone!

  11. As a low information conservative, even I was beginning to think that something was up. The day before the launch, local MSM was warning of an expected short delay the next day.

    I’ve been listening for an update since, but have heard nothing about how the first, and subsequent, days went with the program.

    The lack of information regarding the launch made me wonder if things didn’t go well. Sounds like I was correct. I’d pay money to heard the governor give us a detailed on-air explanation of the system and what happened …

  12. Another Tea Party violence incident:

    A stranger screamed at and grabbed U.S. Rep. Sean Duffy, who has been a vocal advocate for delaying the rollout of the federal health care law, as he walked to the Capitol to vote on legislation, his office said Thursday. He wasn’t harmed.

    Oh… never mind…

  13. So last week, the bank that administers my employers 401K plan gave a presentation on the benefits of signing up for a 401K and specifically signing up with them. An employee in the crowd asked – “I have my checking and savings accounts with your bank, would I be able to see my 401K consolidated with my other accounts via the website?” Bank Rep answer – “No, we’re not quite there yet. We’ve been trying to combine these systems for the last three years, and they (I’m guessing ‘they’ are the IT types) keep saying it will be another three months then it’s another three months and another three months, etc.”
    Now, this isn’t a small bank. I won’t name them here but if I did, you would know them as they are a well known large regional bank. If they can’t merge sytems with the number of datapoints they have in three years, one can only imagine the much more vast task at hand combining the insurance company’s, their products, the users, their afflictions, fifty different sets of rules by the states, the rates by county/district/zip (Did you know that MNSure cherry picked one district the other day so they could show ‘we’ Minnesotans have the cheapest rates? I thought Paul Bunyan was paying the same rate from Ada to Zumbrota.), etc. Then to have Barry compare Obamacares glitches to the new Apple mobile operating system?
    PS: Not sure if you saw this the other day Mitch, but McArdle wrote a nice piece on the IT side of OCare the other day –
    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-25/it-is-one-of-obamacare-s-weakest-links.html
    Best Line: “They were quite certain that everything was under control — of course there might be a few bugs on the first day, because that happens, but there would be no serious issues with the IT side…
    “This is a common tendency among even very smart people — I once had the president of a German bank tell me that his voice recognition software obviously wasn’t working, because he wanted it to be like the computer on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” I had to gently explain that that “computer” was in fact an actor.”
    Now that’s funny right there.

  14. Megan McCardle and Avik Roy on Swiss healthcare:
    http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/04/people-or-rules/237832/
    http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2011/04/29/why-switzerland-has-the-worlds-best-health-care-system/
    Swiss consumers spend about 2.5 times as much, out of pocket, than US healthcare consumers. Most opt for high deductible plans of the sort Obamacare has outlawed. This gives consumers greater influence on health care prices, which in turn keeps costs lower.

  15. So, anyone that thinks that Obumblercare will even survive, is smoking crack. Well, DG has been smoking it for years and it has totaled out her brain, but I digress.

    I have some friends in the medical profession, including my own doctor. They are convinced that this program was designed to fail from the start and based on what they shared with me and the fact that I actually read the bill. I believe they are correct. Barackus Obamanus has always been a proponent of the single payer system and wants to cement his legacy with one final bite in our asses. When this system completely implodes, he and his commie cabal, being big government robots, will need to “rescue” us. Consequently, the government will take over the nation’s healthcare. Then, the libturd believers in unicorns, leprechauns and utopia will have their European/Canadian style healthcare program. And just like the citizens of those countries, their health care as it pertains to surgeries, whether or not they involve life or death, will be decided by unaccountable bureaucrats!! Although I don’t like to wish ill will on people, I fear that mental midgets married to the flawed ideology that is liberatism, i.e. Dog Breath, will have to have to experience it to finally get it. Some of my liberat friends have already realized that the Democrats are whizzing on their legs and trying to convince them that it’s raining.

  16. bosshoss, expect an audit from the IRS in the near future, you are not to release our plans.

  17. Obamacare creates incentives for employers to get out of the business of providing healthcare for their employees. When they do so, the subsidies will become unaffordable (it was budgeted assuming nobody with an employer plan would lose it). The real health reform will happen when Obamacare becomes too expensive.

    I think the two tracks are fairly clear. The Democrats will continue to push to expand eligibility for Medicaid to higher income levels. Republicans will push for high deductible catastrophic care insurance. Both will keep the rules about pre-existing conditions and an individual mandate. To pay for it, health care will become a taxable benefit, and eventually old people will have to decide between Medicaid (re-labeled as Medicare) and a subsidy to buy private insurance. The medical system to deal with Medicaid patients will be forced to reform to cut costs, and will look very different than the private insurance system. I give it 5 years before major reforms will have to be made. Which strain of reform dominates will depend on elections between now and then.

  18. If employer provided health insurance is counted as taxable income, it will be a kick to the crotch of the economy. Disposable income of those people who still have disposable income will be reduced by several thousand dollars per year. Call it two hundred million fewer restaurant meals bought on date night. Businesses will close. People will find themselves without work because of this ‘sensible’ change in the tax laws.
    Economics is like physics. You have to account for the effect of every penny spent or left unspent.

  19. “If employer provided health insurance is counted as taxable income, it will be a kick to the crotch of the economy. ”

    It’s backdoor subsidy to the insurance industry.The GOP’s proposal regarding vouchers will also have the same effect that you claim about the tax subsidies.

    Employer provided healthcare is not only a source of risk in one’s personal finances, it is also a source of inefficiency in the provision of health care, and in the remuneration of workers. Get employers out of the benefits business, so every employee is transparently paid in cash, not benefits.

  20. The difference between Obamacare and a Rube Goldberg contraption is: Goldberg’s contraptions worked.

    Roosevelt imposed wage and price controls to ‘cheat’ inflation. Employer provided health insurance was the ‘cheat’ to beat the controls but not every employer could afford to provide it. Medicaid was the ‘cheat’ to beat marketplace price allocation but it still left a small gap of uncovered people. Obamacare is the ‘cheat’ to cover them. Every time we try to cheat the system, we push it further out of whack.

    The next ‘cheat’ will be to draft everybody in every health care job into the Amerikan Medikal Korps administered by the Surgeon General and enforced by the WaffenIRS, where your access to medical care will be determined after your IRS audit is complete and passports for travel to Mexico to obtain free-market medical care will be prohibited.

    Maybe we should start digging the tunnels from Arizona now, so they can be handicapped equipped in time for the rush.
    .

  21. Powhatan; I’d love to have employer paid health insurance counted as taxable income if they’d raise the deduction for each dependent to a reasonable level. In 1950, it was $600, which is nearly $6000 today according to the BLS inflation calculator. SImplify that tax code!

    (speaking of which, you could also get rid of the difference between employer paid and self-paid insurance in the tax code, too….huge benefit for entrepreneurs and small businesses, I think)

  22. “(it was budgeted assuming nobody with an employer plan would lose it).”
    Yes – it was budgeted with a lot of assumptions (Insert joke here about the meaning of ‘assume’) that weren’t true when they were assumed and yet ignored in the writing of the legislation as well as in the subsequent litigation and the ultimate outcome when one person decided that it was in fact a tax (contrary to the idea that taxes can only originate in the House of Representatives). The fact that Barry over promised (an understatement of some magnitude) and Obamacare will under deliver (again an understatement) won’t be visited by the Democrat Dominated Media Culture. Indeed, the idea that a President can exempt and enforce a law or parts of law as he or she chooses is a new one. Yet Barry and his people will get away with saying that it’s the Republicans fault.
    This country should move towards a user pays system where employers merely pay what they would have paid in benefits to the individual and the indivdual pays for their own insurance based on their own risk tolerance. When I was in Australia, their health insurance works in a way that I thought made sense – there is a national health service that covers everyone with a basic plan. Individuals contribute towards its funding through their taxes. If you want something better than the what the NHS offers, you can buy better coverage over and above what your taxes pay for (or an employer can if they want to offer the benefit to get better employees). This additional coverage allows those who pay for it access to better hospitals and doctors. Now Ozzies are an independent bunch (all that ancestral criminal blood coursing through their veins) and Americans by and large are becoming increasingly dependent (47% was the low estimate) so maybe this wouldn’t work here.
    We are spinning our wheels with how we are going to cover an uninsured gang thug for his bullet wounds. It’s merely going to come out of the rest of our pockets. Might as well find the most efficient way to pay for it yet insure the rest of us are covered too.

  23. In Hawaii there is a law that says that any employee who works > 28 hrs/wk must get highly subsidized health insurance from his or her employer.
    When the law was enacted (1970’s), businesses that could reduced employee hours < 28 hrs. There were problems with workers paying the tab for non-subsidized dependent coverage as well.
    Obamacare has the same problems.
    Obama was living in Hawaii when the Hawaii Prepaid Health care law was rolled out. It was a big deal, a progressive, first in the nation sort of thing.
    I keep telling people Obama ain't particularly intelligent.

  24. After contemplating, procrastinating and just outright forgetting and not thinking about it, I finally signed up for LifeLock on the evening of Sept 29. The October 1 Start of Obamacare and Exchanges was THE SINGULAR motivating factor in my doing (remembering to do) this.

    And I have health insurance from work….and I work for UHG. I doubt we will be thrown to the exchanges. Or at least we’ll be one of the last groups for that when this nightmare finally does come crashing to the ground like a few buildings did on 9/11 way back when. Yes, I went there.

  25. Hey, 0bumblerCare sign up worked famously for Chad Henderson! It is all over the news, haven’t you heard? Oh, wait…

  26. bubbasan has it about right.

    If you also switched Medicare and Obamacare to the state level, including most of its funding (federal funding enough to do some equalizing, and to enforce federal mandates), you’d have a real campaign issue. And even with Medicaid, I strongly suspect that we’ll see many of the states that rejected enhanced Medicaid so loudly quietly accept it in later years, probably as part of other medical reforms at the state level. The Democrats want it, and the Republicans are afraid of giving it to the Democrats as an issue.

  27. I took a DB class a few years ago, Emery. It’s not quite the same issue that the TOR doc discusses, but it is very hard to secure a database. Even with all the data encrypted, the metainformation (what rows and columns are being queried in what sequence) can reveal a lot about the encrypted data. In the same way, knowing who you called from your cellphone at what time and from what location may be all the government needs to get a wiretap warrant, even if they don’t listen in on the content of the calls. Very dangerous stuff in the hands of the government, and a good reason to firewall, say, the NSA and federal and state AG’s.

  28. First, if someone really wants to understand cryptography, you could do worse than to learn a little abstract algebra. The NSA knows a lot of abstract algebra, and it shows up in most of the mathematical gadgets used for cryptography, especially public key systems. This is not the last time we will see the word “field”.

    Second, since the NSA is smarter, more motivated, and better funded than we are, we really, really, really want cryptography that is provably impossible to break. Unfortunately, we cannot have it, because asking this of modern-day computational complexity theory is a little bit like asking the ancient Greeks to solve the Delian problem. Still, we want to come as close as we can.

    The classic flaw of capable people is overconfidence. It takes a certain arrogance to conflate “I do not see how to break this” with “This is unbreakable”, and such arrogance is remarkably common in otherwise smart people. Especially engineers. It is also deadly in this game. Any time you hear anyone — especially an “expert” — say that a cryptographic flaw can be ignored as “purely academic”, you should conclude they are the wrong kind of expert and run away.

  29. By the way, if you are not running a Tor relay yet, now would be a great time to start.

  30. Emery-
    I imagine some German officer, in World War Two, explaining to his superiors that their codes were unbreakable because it would take a thousand people working day and night for a year to crack their code.
    The idea behind encryption is that the encrypted data should be indistinguishable from noise. Assuming that there are algorithms that produce encrypted data that is indistinguishable from noise, my job, as a code-buster, would be to look at information associated with the people who can read the code, identify some behavior on their part that is not noise, and develop an attack vector based on that information.
    It’s a fascinating problem.

  31. Short answer: There is a difference between the ability to place one person under surveillance at great expense, and the ability to put 100 million people under surveillance at no expense. A huge, qualitative difference.

    The former is a necessity. The latter is insane and must be resisted and ultimately destroyed. Planning to do my part.

  32. New avatar. Thanks, NSA!
    Time for Halloween costume avatars. How do you like my “Torrerist”? (courtesy http://media.encrypted.cc/files/nsa/tor-stinks.pdf …) Yeah, Strangelove will return. (Hey, I put a lot of work into this costume. Extracting JFIFs from PDFs etc.)

    QUANTUMCOOKIE is actually kind of awesome. Real-time man-in-the middle TCP (active) to send a redirect, plus complete passive surveillance of Yahoo mail, MSN, etc. to capture the redirect is kind of neat.

    Passive surveillance is one thing, but QUANTUM is something else.

  33. “Torrerist”? Beard, mask, giant vegetable. Looks like a character from Soviet Bloc CGI porn to me.
    My avatar is part of a Frederick Remington illustration from a book of Owen Wister’s short stories.
    Wasn’t Tor started by DARPA? Hopelessly compromised. If it provided security against US government snoops it would be illegal to use.

  34. Thank you. Rather limited audience, I imagine… But I have never cared about that. By the way, that “giant vegetable” is an onion and here’s why: “Tor is an implementation of an onion routing system” The JFIF (avatar) I extracted is a creation of the NSA from their Tor PDF.

    I think you, will appreciate the MJOLNIR document (aka. “2006 research paper on the Tor network, produced for the NSA’s “Cryptanalysis and Exploitation Services” office”). http://media.encrypted.cc/files/nsa/ces-summer-2006-tor-paper-28redacted-29.pdf

    But it’s all good stuff. Clear some time in your reading schedule this weekend to go through all of them. These documents reward a close reading.

  35. Emery, I think that OpenSSL might be Tor’s weak point. Good enough to foil Russian mobsters is not always good enough to foil a nation state. The US federal government is not just the wealthiest nation in the world, it is the wealthiest nation ever, since the universe began. We could spit out nuclear aircraft carriers like a pez dispenser spits out candy, if we wanted. Bustin’ OpenSSL is a scalability problem, not a conceptual problem. It would take a supercomputer 10,000 years to crack it? So 10,000 supercomputers would take a year to crack it?

  36. Amazing how much work the intelligence agencies are applying to Tor, and not just passively. Every threat they ever dreamed about turns out to be real, and then some. I admit to being surprised. (Once upon a time I took a grad crypto class under Micali.)

    NSA has two missions. Protecting U.S. communications from foreign intelligence is one of them. It’s well-known that NSA participates in public security standards. I always thought it was to strengthen them, until now. But tampering with NIST standards to weaken them is in a different category.

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