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Success - Delayed, not Dead
Author: BobR    Date: 2013-10-24 10:57:21

After the budget showdown and the government shutdown, it was pretty clear to everyone that the already shabby Republican reputation took another big hit. It was a personal double-whammy for them, not only being hated even more, but also not succeeding in making President Obama a failure (or - more accurately - not preventing him from succeeding). They failed to prevent the ACA from being enacted, they failed to repeal it (42 times), they failed to get the Supreme Court to overturn it, and they failed to defund (well - sort of, but more on that later). All they've got left now is to wax indignant about the perceived failures of the website, and extrapolate the mostly anecdotal evidence across the entire program, crow that it's already a failure, and demand investigations, explanations, and resignations.

At the center is an admittedly poorly designed and implemented web site (as the designer and coder of this site, I can speak with a modicum of knowledge on this subject). Let's look at the problems that the site faces:

  1. The original plan was for all 50 states to manage their own exchanges. There have been 26 states which signed on. The remaining states are letting the Federal government manage the exchanges for their states. That means the Federal website has to handle registrations for way more people than was originally intended.

  2. The website collects a ton of data from users, and then must verify it against multiple disparate government systems that were never intended to communicate with one another, including the IRS, SSA, DHS, etc. Part of the reason for all of this is to verify eligibility to prevent fraud. Remember that the Republicans wanted the verifications strengthened? This is what that entails.

  3. The website was cobbled together with limited funds because the Republicans blocked funding to the HHS Dept that were required to build it correctly. Now they want her to resign or appear before an investigative panel. Are they sure about that? She can tell them point blank that they succeeded in gimping the system.

  4. This is a fairly typical rollout. When Social Security and then later Medicare were implemented, there were implementation problems at first. That also goes for the Medicare Part D roll out, which was defended by some of the same people critical of this rollout.

  5. The "controversy" over CGI (the developer of the Healthcare Exchange website) notes that they were fired by Canada for problems with that country's healthcare website. The timeline is carefully neglected however. The US government contracted with them in 2011; they weren't fired by Canada until 2012. And let's be honest - if cost overruns or delivery problems means heads should roll, we should have had an avalanche of skulls from the Iraq War contracting nightmare.


As Raine mentioned in her blog yesterday, there is still a phone number you can call if you're having web problems, or if you have no access to a computer (or aren't comfortable with one). Also - there is still a month and half to go in the sign up period. There's no reason that these website glitches needs to be a showstopper for the ACA-decreed programs, despite what hysterics and propagandists might lead you to believe.
 

85 comments (Latest Comment: 10/25/2013 00:22:32 by Raine)
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