Obamacrash

Those who know me also know I’m a great fan of the sitting president. I voted for him twice, and I generally think he’s doing what I elected him to do. And doing it well. Except…

Except, being human, I enjoy watching a train wreck as much as the rest of you. And here’s one even the Republicans enjoy watching.

The Affordable Care Act, now permanently to be known as Obamacare, has been the president’s keystone accomplishment. In 2008 he campaigned on this piece of legislation, and he was elected. Less than two years later he got it passed. Republicans tried many times to unseat the law by legislative means. All such attempts were pieces of political show with no prospect of success. A legal challenge went to the Supreme Court, where the act’s legality was reaffirmed by a margin of one vote. That one vote came from Chief Justice John Roberts, who was appointed by Republican president George W. Bush. Last year the president again campaigned on this legislation and won big. Next the Republican House of Representatives attempted to kill the law by shutting down the government—a piece of folly that resulted in additional damage to the Republican brand.

Now came time to put the law to work.

Contrary to a lot of verbiage flying about the Internet, the ACA is not about social medicine. It’s about the health insurance industry. The law places some stringent rules on the industry, forcing them to provide health insurance to unhealthy markets. In return, the law rewards the industry by forcing people who do not have insurance to purchase it from the industry. That’s where President Obama’s first fiasco hit the fan this week.

People without insurance are required to sign up by March of next year, else pay a fine. There are multiple ways to sign up, but the signature method is a special Web site set up by the government. This is healthcare.gov. On October first, the day the government shut down, the Web site became active. People wanting (needing?) to comply with the law logged on. Crash!

It was immediately obvious that this product was not ready for prime time. A CNN reporter filed her daily narrative detailing lack of success. Of course I’m thinking why does a person working for CNN not already have health insurance through her employer, but I’m also thinking a reporter’s job is to go where she needs to go and do what she needs to do. Anyhow, repeated attempts to complete the process encountered endless waits and failures to create an account. Some lucky few customers were able to set up accounts the first day, but the reporter’s experience was typical.

As CNN continued to report we learned additional details. The cost to the government so far for setting up the Web site exceeds $500 million. That’s a lot of scratch even for something that works. It’s a bit overpriced for something that does not work. Some suggested the entire project should be scrapped and implementation should start over from scratch.

Well, maybe not. Having spent a few decades developing computer software, I have a little insight into these products. The first thing I noticed is that some users had success. This indicates that all the components are functional. The components do not seem to communicate reliably with each other, but they are there. At their base, computer systems are extreme implementations of Isaac Newton’s hypothetical clockwork universe. If such a system is started twice from the same initial state, it will progress along identical paths in both cases. The same goes for any number of starts from the same, identical state.

Real life is different. I also know that, except in cases of pathological design, computer software does not break. If it works on Monday it will work the same on Tuesday. Computers and other hardware are not like that. They wear out, and they break. And people break them. People replace disk drives, they unplug communication cables, they power down servers. The software environment on Tuesday is not the same as it was on Monday. More deadly, at one instance two people can vie for a given resource on Monday, and on Tuesday two million people can vie for the same resource. Identical initial states are an idealization and not a reality. A software design that cannot accommodate this fact are doomed to failure. The time for the ACA site came on October first.

It’s even a bit worse than that. We now know that the design and implementation of the ACA Web site was of necessity time-critical. Republicans are now calling for a postponement of the roll out of the ACA, but the administration and others recognize this is another aspect of their ploy to stall the implementation of the ACA along the road to killing it all together. So, ready or not, on the scheduled date the not ready for prime time system went on-line with the result seen.

We also learn of a system test prior to launch. This test involved only about 100 users. This test failed. Now here’s the real problem. This fact was not disclosed to the chain of command. Especially the president did not know. Either he was not informed or he chose not to ask. This is a big oops in any organization.

As an engineer I have worked on a number of projects, and some of them have been absolute disasters. One thing that came quickly apparent to me is that my first loyalty is to the person who signs my paychecks, and if things are not going well I need to tell this person and let the chips fall where they will. This apparently did not happen.

The person ultimately in charge is Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. I am now hearing that Sebelius knew in advance of the Web site failures, and apparently this information was not communicated up to the person who signs her paycheck, the President of the United States. Failing to come up with a workable Web site for the ACA is excusable. You just tell the president, “We hired the best people we could get, and they have not been able accomplish the task.” Apparently she did not do that.

Others are jumping with joy. In particular Texas Senator Ted Cruz, no stranger to debacle himself, is having a field day.

Ted Cruz: Nigerian emailers run Affordable Care Act site

At a well-received “Welcome Home” speech in Houston on Monday night, Sen. Ted Cruz managed to find a silver lining in the problems with the Affordable Care Act exchange website.

“You may have noticed that all the Nigerian email scammers have become a lot less active lately,” Cruz joked, according to the Houston Chronicle. “They all have been hired to run the Obamacare website.”

Gosh, Ted. Maybe we should have hired the Nigerians to do the site.

Instead, we hired a Canadian company, and some are saying even they were not up to the job. Again an industry expert being interviewed on CNN this morning recounted the government’s purchasing policies can prevent hiring the best and the brightest. He mentioned the wisdom we have known for decades: “An astronaut flying to the moon knows that his trip home depends on a rocket motor built by the lowest bidder.”

I’ve seen Senator Cruz on TV a lot recently, likening the ACA to an attack on his Texas constituents. There has been some come back on this:

Hey, Ted Cruz! These Texans Say Obamacare Is Helping Them
But the Affordable Care Act could still fail if the federal government doesn’t get its act together.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has compared his fight to defund the Affordable Care Act to the fight against Nazi Germany. He sees it as his duty to provide “relief to the millions of people who are hurting because of Obamacare.” The uninsured in his own state will tell you a different story.

Stacy Anderson, from Fort Worth, runs her own business selling sweaters online. She says she has not had health insurance for the past seven years because the sweater business is not too lucrative. “It cost more than I made some months,” she says. Anderson says she was just diagnosed with skin cancer, though it is not life-threatening. “I’ve had it, apparently, for the entire seven years I’ve been uninsured,” she says. “It will be nice if I can buy health insurance and get it treated.”

Jeffrey Coffey is a 49-year-old from Austin who earns a living as a musician. He says has insurance, but notes that the $361 monthly premium is “way expensive” on his $22,000 salary; he says he pays more because he has asthma. Coffey says he applied for cheaper plans numerous times this year, but was turned down. “Getting rejection letters is depressing,” he says. When Coffey buys insurance on the exchange, he estimates he will able to get coverage for $160 a month, a $200 savings. “But so far I haven’t been able to log on to the website,” he adds.

Cruz, and others, have linked the Web interface to the life of the ACA. These people may be a little off base. The Web interface is not the ACA, and it is not the only means for obtaining insurance and complying with the law. Fortunately for our 21st century world we still have some 20th century technology left over. You can get insurance by picking up the phone and placing a toll-free call. Wait times have been just a few minutes, and it takes a 25-minute interview to obtain insurance for one person, 45 minutes for a family. For people without a computer this is going to have to be the way. There is also the Post Office. It’s one part of the government that was not shut down by the Republicans, and all you need to do is obtain a form and mail it in. Uh, you get the form as a PDF on-line, and that part works.

A number of commentators point out a significant danger of the Web site’s failing. The danger is that millennials are inclined to use the latest technology, and doing business by phone, let alone by mail, is going to turn them off. The ACA needs these people to purchase insurance, and the problem is these people tend to be young and healthy, and they do not need insurance to the extent baby boomers do. The ACA works like employer-provided coverage in that everybody is in the same group, and the healthy pay in more than they get out, while the unhealthy reap the benefit of paying the same and getting more. Young and healthy people can just opt to pay the fine. They don’t get any health insurance, but the fine does not completely make up for the premiums lost to the system.

Anyhow, the Republicans are continuing their move to kill the ACA and are using the disastrous Web site roll-out as a lever. The administration is playing damage control, striving mightily to get the site working to acceptable standards in time to capture their needed market of healthy users. And I am wondering if Sebelius is going to keep her job.

Also, I am not personally concerned about the ACA Web site. The ACA does not affect me, because I already have health insurance subsidized by the tax payers. In the mean time I have a message to all the president’s Republican detractors:

Thank you all very much, and may Jesus have mercy on your souls.