Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
The reason the Obama-care website doesn’t work correctly is the software is barely half written. They still need to write the code for payment systems to make payment to issuers in January.
Even if you managed to sign up using the already-written application software, you can’t actually buy a policy because you can’t pay for it. The software doesn’t exist, yet.
Richard Fernandez at The Belmont Club says: “That would explain why the system didn’t work. The president had launched a program with a lot of parts missing and apparently expected to see it function, rather like a producer who opens a movie nationwide with only the trailer completed and expects it to be a box office hit.”
Joe Doakes
But it might be how someone who’s never produced a movie except in theory might do a movie.
A systems programmer will know what to do when society breaks down, because the systems programmer already lives in a world without law
Did you expect anything but from absentminded libturds? Your goobernment at work, pure and simple. Yet more proof of utter dysfunction and folly of soci@list utopians.
It’s still one of my favorite story’s to come out of this debacle. Megan McArdle of Bloomberg News had been an IT Consultant prior to becoming a writer. Seems a bank president demanded to know why his computer couldn’t respond to him like the computer on ‘Star Trek’ did to Captain Picard. She gently explained that “the computer” on ‘Star Trek’ was in fact an actor reading from a script.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-25/it-is-one-of-obamacare-s-weakest-links.html
Certainly there is some schadenfreude to be had at the expense of the Smart! est people in the world being run aground because they treated O-Care IT like some bubblehead housewife treats her finances (there are checks in the checkbook so she assumes there is money in the account). But of course this is serious business. There are people, God help them, who were counting on this to work so they could get ‘health care’ with their never had before ‘health insurance’. The fact that Barry & Kathy so screwed the pooch on just the IT part alone (and our ‘watchdog media’ labeled as a terrorist anyone who questioned the systems ability to perform they way the Smart! est people in the world said it would) is just sad.
McArdles latest column has the full story and is even more to the point regarding the Smart! est people in the world and their approach to IT as well as a cautionary tale for IT people being asked to do the impossible.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-25/obamacare-is-no-starship-enterprise.html
“And, of course, on the other side, nontechnical stakeholders should make it their business to find out what is possible before, not after, they commit to designs and deadlines.
We like to think that being “smart and competent” makes you less likely to make mistakes. But when you’re out of your element, it may merely enable you to make more — and larger — mistakes.”
Why would anyone have thought that this would work?
27,000 pages of rules + $600 million cannot duplicate the intelligence of a market.
Even if, one day, the website functions, you’ll have some guy who is a $250/month health insurance risk paying $500/month. This isn’t efficient economically, this isn’t what the guy wants to pay. It will be what the government wants him to pay, though, so Obammy and his minions will consider the guy’s $500/month premium a success story. They’ll open the champagne bottles.
“But it might be how someone who’s never produced a movie except in theory might do a movie.”
I can imagine the quote to go along with that:
“I would make a great movie producer!”
The guy let a system go live, knowing that it wasn’t even half done?
Are we dealing with a liar here, or a psychopath? And this would mean that the total number of enrollees outside of Medicaid is zero, wouldn’t it?
Politicians with only legislative background don’t have experience setting goals, planning, evaluating, hiring and firing, and they don’t have a stable of people ready to go to work for them who know how to make things work in a big bureaucracy. The president’s advisers are all political hacks. He filled his cabinet with politicians, not managers.
Control of the machinery of government is an area where Republican legislators can do little to the President. Were he more effective in managing that machinery, he could still produce many positive outcomes despite the legislative logjam. Creating an effective and usable health care market is one obvious example.
Emery, let’s be serious here; should it really take a seasoned manager to comprehend “the system isn’t even half written, let alone tested”? You may as well argue that a line worker at Toyota isn’t capable of noticing that the seats and engine haven’t been installed on your new Camry, no?
Sorry, this isn’t just because Dear Leader isn’t a good manager. This is about the supposed leader of the free world being criminally negligent in his exercise of his duties–in the same way he’s criminally negligent by leaving the Iranians enough enriched uranium for several dirty bombs.