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 Post Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2013 1:51 am 
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Well no. The government isn't always bad at everything it does, just like the private sector isn't always good at everything it does. Governments are good at some things and bad at others, and this also varies between governments.

Administering the Obamacare programme and and building the Obamacare website are two different skill-sets. The programme consists of basically two things. The government has to a) require people to buy health insurance or pay a tax penalty, and b) determine whether people are eligible for subsidies, and how much.

Part a) basically is a new line on everyone's tax form, and the IRS does similar things all the time.
Part b) consists of the same kind of income verification the government already uses to determine whether people are eligible for Medicaid, or how much Social Security they're entitled to, or how much subsidy they can claim for Medicare Part D. It is a gigantic administrative task but it consists of the same sort of paper-pushing admin the government already knows how to do, only bigger. It's Romneycare scaled up, that's all.

Now, building a gigantically complicated nationwide website that has to access and verify people's personal information from multiple insurers' and government databases all at once, that is what they were bad at. They were bad at subcontracting to competent IT developers, bad at overseeing the multiple developers, and bad at making sure said developers all worked together so that the different parts of the site fit together. And they were probably bad at understanding all the things that could potentially go wrong, and therefore did not even know what they did not know when they rolled it out and it went kaput.

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 Post Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2013 11:21 am 
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Also, they changed the requirements at the 11th hour, in a way that increased the load on the authentication server by an order of magnitude.

Don't change the requirements at the last minute, people!

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 Post Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2013 2:19 pm 
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I still refuse to participate.

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 Post Posted: Sat Nov 30, 2013 1:28 pm 
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I wonder how much it hurt to have the shutdown occur right as the website was coming up, thus preventing anyone from actually addressing these problems at the moment they arose, and disrupting the operations and staff of the government agencies and contractors responsible for dealing with the system.

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 Post Posted: Sun Dec 01, 2013 10:28 am 
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Considering how long after the end of the shutdown we still have problems, it doesn't seem to have been that big a deal.

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 Post Posted: Mon Dec 02, 2013 9:02 am 
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Problems don't magically vanish after what's creating them stops. Injuries need to heal, when fired engineers lengthen the red lights by just a few seconds there's massive disruption that still causes economic damage years later.

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 Post Posted: Mon Dec 02, 2013 11:40 am 
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This doesn't seem like that kind of case. It wasn't ready the day before the shutdown started.

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 Post Posted: Tue Dec 03, 2013 5:10 am 
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They say the website's working better now. It's still crap, but at least it's processing a lot of applications instead of just barfing up at people and falling over dead.

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 Post Posted: Wed Dec 04, 2013 12:28 pm 
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And yet it still has worse security than a block of swiss cheese

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 Post Posted: Thu Dec 05, 2013 4:39 am 
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What are some of the holes?

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