Oh Goody - we're all about to play Obamacare Roulette! - Granite Grok

Oh Goody – we’re all about to play Obamacare Roulette!

Spin that screen and see what prices come up for you!  Sheesh….

An Obamacare software glitch is now incorrectly tabulating how much people must pay for health insurance, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

“There’s a blanket acknowledgment that rates are being calculated incorrectly,” a senior health insurance executive told the WSJ. “Our tech and operations people are very concerned about the problems they’re seeing and the potential of them to stick around.”

Government officials, however, say they are not worried and promised the Obamacare insurance exchanges will be ready to go on October 1. “We continue working with [insurers] and we are confident that on Oct. 1, consumers will see accurate premium costs, including tax credits,” said Medicare spokesperson Brian Cook.

Randomness in this case is a huge bug, not a feature.  And when the techies are concerned and the bureaucrats are acting like Kevin Bacon near the end of Animal House, I feel sorry for those folks who have no choice to be the “first adopters”.

You know, this is the whole purpose of the system how much does the Government want me to fork over for the insurance they have mandated for me to pay?  The Number One Function – and they can’t consistently get it right??  Oh. My. God.  And they spent $88 million for this?  And have had three years to get the logic down pat.  I’m really hoping that somebody who is actually working on this, but I bet I’m getting the basics down:

  • Identify who I am (sign in)?
  • How much do I and my household earn?
  • Where do I lie on the poverty line?
  • How much of a subsidy should I receive?
  • Show me the plans and their costs
  • Show me how much I have to pay?

And that’s just 30 seconds of thinking.  Sure, it is much harder and much more complicated, but that’s the general reasoning.

Just for the heck of it, I went over to Healthcare.gov just to see how bad it was.  Well, it didn’t even meet my low expections.  What I saw gave me the impression of a badly written campaign site – full of holes, functionality not working, and of really no use at all.  Here’s one small (and if I was the programmer, rather embarrassing): ask where to get “help” here in NH and the system returned four answers – all of them the same.  Really?  Four?  That should have been caught during testing by the original programmer or in unit / simulation load testing.  Does anyone in this project know what “QA” really means?  That was the kind of error that should have been caught day 1.

And for those of you already saying “Well, if you Republicans would have gotten on board there in NH, we’d all have working software!!”.  ‘Fraid not, deary. Healthcare.gov  IS the Federal site; of all of the Exchanges that are supposed to be up and running in 11 days, that small little piece should have been ready, oh, 2 years ago??

So, defund it?  You bet.  But the alternative is not to delay it to allow the system to get caught up (assuming that this is not a false flag site put up as a ruse, which is something in which  I would not be surprised later), I would be telling Republicans to put the pedal to the metal and INSIST that this collection of spaghetti code actually work Day One.  And if not?  Then kill it as simply as a government project overrun.

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