It took me a while to put these two dots together.
When the President said that you wouldn't lose your health plan if you
like it, and now says losing it is an unintended consequence, I now
realize that it's an intended consequence.
The "substandard plans" are the ones that young, healthy people buy --
low premiums and little more than catastrophic coverage. The
President had to force these people off of these plans, and force into
the more expensive plans, because these people are main source of
money for Obamacare. So when the President promised that you could
keep your health plan, he knew that he was going to force you off your
health plan, because he needed to confiscate your money.
I also understand that HealthCare.gov consists of about 120 components
written by 50 or so different groups or contractors. In my
experience, the biggest cause of IT disaster is that managers assume
that when the components work individually, then they'll automatically
all work together. Actually, integration takes as much time and money
as the entire rest of the project -- and that's with only 3 or 4
components. An analogy is that you have an architect, a carpenter, a
plumber and an electrician from four different countries, and you want
them to build a house. They speak four different languages, and
they're familiar with four different building codes. There's no way
they can build a house together. Dealing with 120 components is going
to be many man-months of work, because there are at least 120
different interfaces, each with its own security and scalability
issues that obviously have not even been considered up till now.
This software system should have cost $10-25 million, and should have
worked satisfactorily on October 1, even though the product it was
selling is faulty. Instead, it's already cost $300-600 million, and
will cost billions before it's done, which may not happen because I
believe that this is a catastrophe of such magnitude that it will be
necessary to cancel it.
Here's a list of warning signs that were ignored and are still being
ignored:
- Development checkpoints were missed, almost from the beginning.
- There was no focus on integration problems to arise from having
some 120 components from some 50 programming groups. In my personal
experience, integration issues are the biggest technical factor in IT
disasters.
- There was no configuration management.
- The main contractor warned the White House repeatedly, starting
months in advance, that the web site wasn't ready, and the warnings
were ignored. The suspicion is that these warnings were perfunctory,
mainly for legal protection in case anything went wrong. At any rate,
there's little doubt that the White House did not want to hear this.
I have no doubt that anyone who was too exuberant in pointing out
problems would have been quickly and firmly fired.
- A few tests were performed prior to launch. They failed, and were
ignored.
- Warnings of security breaches were ignored.
- Warnings that "navigators" could be identity thieves or convicts,
since no background checks were being performed, were ignored.
- Warnings that insurance companies were splitting up markets,
creating regional monopolies, were ignored.
- Warnings that doctors and hospitals were leaving the program were
ignored.
- Warnings that most people were signing up for free Medicaid, while
only the old and sick are signing up for paid Obamacare, are being
ignored.
- Warnings that prices are spiraling out of control are being
ignored.