Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Americans comment on the web about the 600 million dollar Obamacare website fiasco

*  "And, I still cannot believe that people are not aghast at how much this is costing. 

We could easily have covered the 12-15m folks that needed insurance with the money being burned in this misadventure. 

But, then, it was never about the final "product" as it was about the final "ideological product."




*  "This "tech surge" presents an incredible opportunity for some serious fuckery in the healthcare website coding. Imagine if a group were to sub a part of their project out to some malware coders who put in a small amount of code that lays dormant until some time after the second go-live day passes and then executes.


Just a thought."



 *   "On one of the recent Coffee and Markets podcasts, it was stated that a generally-accepted rule of thumb is that it takes one man-day to produce one completed, debugged, tested line of code. If that's correct, and the five-million lines is a good estimate, that thing is not getting fixed anytime soon."

Note the Brooks Law: Throwing more people at a software development project that is behind schedule only pushes it more behind schedule.



 *  "If the New York Times is correct about a real fix requiring a rewrite of 5 million lines of code, then a Thanksgiving fix sounds pretty optimistic.

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It depends on how terminally f*cked the basic programming and design of the website / system is.

If the system itself works and it's just bad programming habits that are making this thing screw up, that can be fixed if you know right where to fix it.

I have a distinct feeling, though, that thissystem is so flawed that it will require a ground-up rebuild, which they may be lucky to get to by NEXT Thanksgiving.


Trenchant commentary from Ace of Spades.

2 comments:

  1. One of the key marketing points is that you have to "register" before you can see what it's going to cost you. If anyone ran a business like that, they wouldn't sell anything... So even when it's fixed, sticker shock will keep a lot of people out of it.

    I expect that Obama will roll the US Military out of Tricare and into ObamaCare to get healthy people to sign up and pay into the system. It's the only healthy, young pool that the government has its thumb on.

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    Replies
    1. Excellent point, and one I haven't seen before.

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