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Hypocrisy Alert! The Party of Defund Obamacare concerned about ‘healthcare.gov’ web site glitches.

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The party that shut down the government in an attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act wants to fire the person in charge of implementing the program … because the web site does not work well:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) said Tuesday that the secretary must be “held accountable” for Obamacare’s rocky online rollout.

Republicans have been fiercely critical of the Obamacare web portal’s glitch-ridden Oct. 1 launch. Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) called for the HHS secretary’s resignation a few weeks ago, asserting “Americans are tired of the Sebelius spin.”

Hate Affordable Care Act and vote 44 times to repeal it. Check.

Hate Affordable Care Act and shut down the government to delay/defund it. Check.

Call for the resignation of the person in charge of implementing the health care law you despise … wait … NOW I get it.

Nice try, GOP. Guess what? You can also sign up via telephone

By phone

We can help you complete the entire application process from beginning to end with information you provide over the phone, including reviewing your options and helping you enroll in a plan. We can also answer questions as you fill out an online or paper application. We’re available 24/7.

1-800-318-2596

TTY: 1-855-889-4325

Impeach the president for knowing that the web site was having problems and not jumping in to help with the code? Sounds like a plan …

“Benghaziiii!!! IRSSSSSSSS!!!!!  Bad website coooooooode!!!!”


Categories: Uncategorized.

/ 23 Comments

23 comments

  1. JanF

    Sebelius confirmed that Obama learned of the bugs after the launch.

    “I think we talked about having testing going forward and if we had an ideal situation and could have built a product in a five-year period of time we probably would have taken five years, but we didn’t have five years and certainly Americans who rely on health coverage didn’t have five years for us to wait,” she said. “We wanted to make sure we made good on this final implementation of the law.”

    TPM

  2. JanF

    Healthcare.gov – Glitches Should Be Expected, Perfection Shouldn’t Be

    There’s been a lot of criticism directed at the rollout of the healthcare.gov signup for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. The website has had a lot of glitches, and now the government is bringing in top tech help to fix the problems.   While some of the criticisms are valid, many are not.  One of the most pernicious is that “private industry would never allow something like this out.”  Speaking as someone with a couple of decades of IT experience under his belt, I can state that that particular line is … unmitigated bullshit.   Private industry does it all the time, in fact, it’s a major surprise if they release something on time and on budget that works out of the box.

    He has some excellent examples showing how some of the biggest tech companies have glitchy roll-outs. I will add my own: just recently, multi-billion dollar PRIVATE company Microsoft launched Windows 8. It was an unmitigated disaster that led to the sales of PCs to plummet by 14% as companies and individuals decided to delay computer purchases until the design issues could be corrected.

    Norbrook concludes:

    In reading through all the criticism, I see some valid points.  There were delays in things like regulations that shouldn’t have been.  The groups with the right expertise weren’t called in early on, or put in charge.  Testing cycles were skipped or skimped.  Those are valid criticisms, but “what’s done, is done.”  It’s a lesson for the next time a major project like this starts.  The “repair crews” are working, more technical expertise is being brought on board, and the fixes are underway.  It’ll get better, and the problems will be solved.

    But the criticism that isn’t valid?  That it should have been perfect.  That should never have been expected.

  3. JanF

    Builders Of Obama’s Health Website Saw Red Flags

    Project developers who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity — because they feared they would otherwise be fired — said they raised doubts among themselves whether the website could be ready in time. They complained openly to each other about what they considered tight and unrealistic deadlines. One was nearly brought to tears over the stress of finishing on time, one developer said. Website builders saw red flags for months.

    Pardon me but there is nothing in that paragraph that would surprise anyone who has been in the IT business for more than 6 months. All deadlines are unrealistic, all end-users are unreasonable, and stress is part of the job.

    To turn it into “red flags!!!” is more a reflection of the right-wing Associate Press’ right-wingedness than anything enlightening about the process of writing millions of lines of code, implementing dozens of user interfaces, and integrating it all with legacy systems.

    At some point you have to roll out the site and let the general public give it a whirl. Lots of things will work well but the parts that don’t will always be the most critical pieces. A reminder: Murphy’s law

    Anything that can possibly go wrong, does.

    Or Murphy’s Law, revised and extended:

    If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the first one to go wrong.

       Corollary – If there is a worse time for something to go wrong, it will happen then.

    If anything can’t go wrong, it will anyway.

    If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which something can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way, unprepared for, will promptly develop.

    Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.

  4. princesspat

    Obamacare Enrollment Numbers Mean Nothing Right Now

    As Harvard School of Public Health Professor John McDonough, who like Gruber worked on both the Massachusetts and federal reforms, wrote recently in the Boston Globe:

    “Bottom line – expectations of large-scale, instantaneous enrollment in the ACA are unrealistic and uninformed.

    Massachusetts has achieved a level of coverage which is higher than the likely full impact of the ACA ever – about 97% of all state residents.  The rest of the nation should be so lucky.  AND, it did not happen over night.  It was a slow crawl, not a sprint.”

    This doesn’t mean the website problems don’t matter. They matter! It does mean the administration has time to fix them.

    Obamacare Has Had a Brutal Few Days, But It’s the Next Few Weeks That Count

    And there are genuine reasons for optimism, if you’re looking for them. The administration isn’t lying when it says the federal sites are functioning better than they were. More people are finally getting through those opening stages of the process. The underlying architecture is also getting much-needed attention, although it’s not the kind of stuff people will notice right away. For example, a source familiar with the situation tells me that the system now has much better “instrumentation”-in effect, spots in the code that allow HHS to figure out how well different parts of the process are working. That will make it much easier to pinpoint problems and check fixes as they take effect. Meanwhile, the states running their own sites are doing a much better job-the reports (and first-hand accounts I’ve heard) from California, Connecticut, Kentucky, New York, and Washington state are proof that the online system can work and, for the many people living in those states, are working already. That’s a whole lot of people for whom Obamacare is doing what it’s supposed to do.

    ~snip~

    But, assuming the administration is doing everything it can, there’s really nothing to do between now and then except wait. And, here, Obama appears to have one very key ally: The public. Polls show the voters want to give the law a chance to work…..

    The enrollment numbers from Washington and Oregon States are encouraging despite state website glitches…..

    Compared to other sites, WA health exchange off to decent start

    On the state’s Washington Healthplanfinder, more than 35,000 people have enrolled for healthcare coverage. Another 70,000 people have applied for coverage, but haven’t yet submitted their payment to enroll.

    Compare that to Oregon. Its exchange site, known as “Cover Oregon,” has had zero enrollees because of technical glitches and had only received 1,300 paper applications, according to the latest numbers released. But the state has enrolled approximately 56,000 under Medicaid by sidestepping the site altogether.

    Those in the media just focusing on the site difficulties are missing the real story. The ACA is already making peoples lives better. Our 43 yr old son with a history of life threatening blood clots will have a choice of coverage and if he keeps his existing plan it will both cost less and have  much more manageable deductibles thanks to the ACA.

  5. JanF

    Liberal pundit fail: Rush to attack Obamacare site only aids unhinged right

    It was predictable that the media would go nuts about this today, given that they’ve spent so much time having their noses rubbed in how insane the GOP has become, after trying so hard, for so long, to ignore it. It feels like a law of nature. Nature abhors a vacuum; media nature abhors a false-equivalence vacuum.



    The Washington Post’s great Ezra Klein [picked] up the cudgel, telling the crew at MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” where every Obama misstep foretells the end of his presidency, that the Health and Human Services Department is covering up a massive “management failure,” because they had enough pre-launch information to know there were going to be massive problems and neither adjusted their rollout plan or prepared the public.

    That’s fair, but then Klein took to Twitter and began sharing his experience trying to sign up for healthcare over the phone, and complained about “the lack of hold music.” Twitter replied with a trending hashtag #ezrakleinsholdmusic.

    Liberal pundits don’t have to be Obama-bots but they could at least not parrot right-wing talking points.

    This:

    Does anyone think if the website worked perfectly, dishonest conservatives wouldn’t be pointing to other alleged problems? The sight of people from Sen. John McCain to wingnuts on Twitter, who didn’t want the government to help the uninsured get health insurance, now lamenting the trouble those uninsured are having navigating a new website – well, it would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad and corrupt.

  6. JanF

    He talks about the “upper reaches of the courtier press” pivoting to this new outrage, itchy because the last outrage (the shutdown) did not fall neatly into their pathological false equivalence meme. “They both do it! Okay … okay … one of them is crazee.”.

    Everybody’s An Expert

    The roll-out has not been what it should be. It is possible that the testing done prior to launching the sites was inadequate. (A friend who’s spent 30 years in the IT biz e-mailed the other day telling me that, in his experience, almost every time a company had a great new website it wanted to launch, the scramble to get the thing up there resulted in scrimping on the pre-launch testing, with predictable consequences.) But the wailing and the gnashing of teeth and the calls for delays in implementing the entire law are complete baloney.[…]

    To the surprise of approximately nobody, the kidz at Tiger Beat On The Potomac have been banging this tin drum the loudest:

       Here’s what he didn’t do: explain why those problems weren’t addressed before the Oct. 1 launch, why he didn’t seem to be aware of them before they went very public, or who would be suffering the consequences for any of it. He didn’t apologize. He announced, in broad terms, who would be coming in to help. But he didn’t say anything about who would be shown the exits. […] He puts himself forward as a man frustrated with what’s happened on his watch, promising change, insisting that nothing of the sort could ever happen again. There’s a level of semantic distance there, though, that often gets interpreted as an inherent refusal to take responsibility.

    Leadership! Yeah, that’s the ticket. It’s right there in Article I — The President Shall Be IT Nerd-In-Chief.

  7. JanF

    Obamacare Enrollment Process

    Under current law, the initial enrollment period ends on March 31, even though the individual mandate goes into effect on Jan. 1. The government can use “short coverage gaps” of up to three months before imposing the penalty, meaning that individuals have until March 1 to become enrolled in coverage if they hope to escape the mandate’s fines.

    But to meet that deadline, the Associated Press had estimated that uninsured individuals and families must actually sign up for insurance by Feb. 15 – it takes two weeks to process the application and the coverage kicks in on the first of every month. People who signed up after that date could therefore be penalized.

    So being enrolled by March 1 may be impossible if you can’t get an online application done by Feb. 15th. And if you take the entire time of the open enrollment period and sign up in March, that policy will not be effective until April 1, making you out of compliance and subject to penalty.

    It is too early to speculate but it sounds like they may make the “compliance” the receipt of the application, by March 31st, rather than the start of coverage. That would add another 6 weeks to the enrollment deadline … which is about what experts are saying it may take to get most of the web site glitches ironed out. There would still be details to work out because an application, I am guessing, could be rejected meaning that people could be without coverage and without a pending enrollment after March 31st. Maybe that number would be small enough to be manageable on a case by case basis.

  8. JanF

    Web Sites and Grave Sites

    Republicans are pretending that they care about the problems encountered in signing up for a system that many of them are bent on destroying.

    They are demanding an immediate fix to something they want to break. […]

    The Web site will be fixed. Can the same be said of the party that has planted its flag on the outskirts of reason? Can the same be said of the party being hijacked by hyperpartisans?

    In the long stretch of history, Obamacare will be judged on the merits of the policy, not the rollout of a Web site. That judgment will be sober and thorough. And along the way, as some things work and others don’t – as is the way with ambitious laws – things will be tweaked.

    +2 for “planted its flag on the outskirts of reason”!!

    Charles Blow points out that what “worries some Republicans most – that the law will succeed over their Chicken Little, sky-is-falling naysaying. They need the law to fail to validate their enmity.” Exactly.

    Then he delivers the blow:

    The Republican Party’s conduct during this period in the country’s history will get the same sober, thorough judgment from history as the health care law, and that judgment is not likely to be kind.

    History will record that this is the moment that the party camped out in its own graveyard, hastening the demise of its national viability; that it gave up on America, while constantly reminiscing about America as it once was; that its thought leaders were replaced by crusade leaders and the Grand Old Party saw its grandeur subside; that it came to realize that it couldn’t forever be the party of intransigence in a nation of progress, without being burned by the friction inherent in those two warring concepts.

  9. princesspat

    Wonkbook: The GOP’s Obamacare chutzpah


    The GOP’s strategy hasn’t just tried to win elections and repeal Obamacare. They’ve actively sought to sabotage the implementation of the law. They intimidated the people who were implementing the law. They made clear that problems would be exploited rather than fixed. A few weeks ago, they literally shut down the government because they refused to pass a funding bill that contiained money for Obamacare.

    The Obama administration deserves all the criticism it’s getting for the poor start of health law and more. Their job was to implement the law effectively — even if Republicans were standing in their way. So far, it’s clear that they weren’t able to smoothly surmount both the complexities of the law and the political roadblocks thrown in their path. Who President Obama will ultimately hold accountable — if anyone — for the failed launch is an interesting question.

    But the GOP’s complaints that their plan to undermine the law worked too well and someone has to pay border on the comic. If Republicans believe Sebelius is truly to blame for the law’s poor launch, they should be pinning a medal on her.

    Finally! His continued criticism of the web site has become very annoying so it’s good to see his focus broadening.

  10. JanF

    Ted Cruz could start an argument in an empty house

    Margaret is it just me or have the Republicans gone bat shit crazy?   First they are screaming bloody murder about Obamacare and then they complain because people are having trouble signing up for Obamacare.  Do they want the thing more alive so they can enjoy killing it?  Or are they just upset because Obama is still black?

    +2 for “These days, the Republican platform is so crooked it could get lost behind a cork screw.” 🙂

  11. princesspat

    USE OF TIME

    Let me see if I have conservatives’ views straight here: It’s a disaster of epic proportions if someone has to wait 20 minutes for a government website to load but no big deal if people have to wait in line for 8 hours to vote.

    Makes sense to me.

    And for the record, I went through the whole process of getting estimate from the insurance exchanges on healthcare.gov and it took, from clicking on the first link to getting a list of options, a little over seven minutes. That’s not to say that the website works that quickly and efficiently for everyone who has ever tried to use it, but let’s just say I did not consider the experience to be taxing. I pulled through.

    I’m enjoying his point of view and the comments are relatively safe to read as well.

  12. JanF

    Under Bush, Republicans Vigorously Defended Health Care Reform Despite Serious Glitches

    As the House Energy and Commerce Committee holds its first hearing on the implementation of the the Affordable Care Act on Thursday, it’s worth noting that some of the very same Republicans who are lashing out against Obamacare, arguing that the botched rollout is proof that the government cannot implement effectively and should repeal the law entirely, gave the Bush administration a pass and urged Americans not to pre-judge such a complicated process. At least four of the Republicans still on the committee had argued that early implementation hurdles should not taint the entirety of reform: (here are two)

    REP. JOE BARTON (R-TX): “This is a huge undertaking and there are going to be glitches. My goal is the same as yours: Get rid of the glitches. The committee will work closely with yourself and Dr. Mark McClellan at CMS to get problems noticed and solved.” [Barton Statement via Archive.org, 2/15/2006]

    REP. MICHAEL BURGESS (R-TX): “We can’t undo the past, but certainly they can make the argument that we are having this hearing a month late and perhaps we are, but the reality is the prescription drug benefit is 40 years late and seniors who signed up for Medicare those first days back in 1965 when they were 65 years of age are now 106 years of age waiting for that prescription drug benefit, so I hope it doesn’t take us that long to get this right and I don’t believe that it will. And I do believe that fundamentally it is a good plan.” [“Medicare Part D: Implementation of the New Drug Benefit,” 3/1/2006]

    The same guys!! Not ones who were kicked out of office for being reasonable. The same guys talking about a Republican law being implemented by a Republican administration.

    No wonder this is being called a “monkey court” and a “clown show”.  

  13. JanF

    Sebelius: ‘I Don’t Work For’ The People Who Want Me To Resign (VIDEO)

    “The majority of people calling for me to resign, I would say, are people who I don’t work for, and who do not want this program to work in the first place,” Sebelius said during a press conference at a call center in Phoenix, Ariz.

    I noticed that Fox News put the following chyron under her testimony (on the video in that article):

    “Sebelius: I Don’t Work For The People That Want Me To Resign”

    Because they would hate to use proper grammar when packaging their spew.

    No, Kathleen Sebelius does not work for the House Republicans who voted 46 times to repeal or dismantle the Affordable Care Act. She works for the American people who elected and re-elected President Obama.

    p.s.

    “The Republican Party:

    Concerned about your health care since … never”

  14. JanF

    Admin: HealthCare.gov Will Be Fixed By End Of November

    Federal officials said Friday that HealthCare.gov would be working smoothly for the vast majority of users by the end of November.

    Jeff Zients, a top White House adviser who was brought in to lead the “tech surge” to assess the site’s problems and fix them, announced the timeline on a conference call with reporters.

    “The top-line result is that the HealthCare.gov site is fixable,” Zients said. “But it’ll take a lot of work.”[…]

    The administration has “dozens of items” to address, Zients said. They can generally be divided into two groups: performance problems (site speed, response times, reliability) and functional problems (bugs that prevent the site from working properly).

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