Posted on 11/18/2013 10:24:04 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
A short but important post from Jeryl Bier at the Standard. To refresh your memory, the reason everyone from Obama to Sebelius to the rank-and-file on the “tech surge” team keeps babbling about fixing the website by the end of this month is because the deadline for signing up for insurance coverage is just two weeks later, on December 15th, if you want it to take effect at the beginning of the year. In a perfect world where the White House had some dim sense of what it was doing, the “young healthies” on whom O-Care’s fiscal stability depends would already be signing up en masse via Healthcare.gov. People who’ve had their plans canceled would, at least, now have the option of signing up on the website so that they don’t suffer a lapse of coverage in January, even if that means higher premiums. Obama would have spent the past month doing a nonstop publicity tour encouraging people to enroll before mid-December to make sure that they have insurance on 1/1. In the world we actually live in, where the president supposedly didn’t find out that the federal insurance exchange was a smoking crater until after it went live on October 1st, virtually no one’s been able to enroll in an exchange plan yet. If — if — the website can be repaired by November 30th, that’ll give the White House two weeks at least to warn people that they need to enroll immediately if they want their new coverage in effect on New Year’s Day. It ain’t much, but it’s something.
But what if that’s all wrong? What if signing up for coverage by December 15th doesn’t by itself ensure that your new plan takes effect on January 1st? In fact, says Bier, in order to be covered at the start of 2014, not only do you need to sign up by 12/15 but you need to pay your first premium too. And, like everything else, that’s not easy to do on Healthcare.gov.
TWS: If I don’t pick a plan until 12/15, won’t it be too late for my info to go to the insurance company, them to bill me, and me to make a payment by 12/21? Seems pretty tight.
[Healthcare.gov] Rep: You must make your first premium payment by 12/15/13 for your coverage to begin January 1, 2014. If you make your payment by the 21st, your coverage will begin in February 1, 2014.
TWS: You said above “It may give you that option” to pay on healthcare.gov. Does that mean it’s not available yet?
Rep: We are still experiencing some technical difficulties with the website, which is why it would be best to possibly go through the insurance company to make your first premium payment.
How many members of the “five percent” (the actual number is likely higher) will have enough cash available in a pinch — right before Christmas, mind you — to pony up that surprise first premium on time? How many “young healthies,” having enrolled on the site, will somehow have it slip their mind that they need to contact their insurer separately to arrange payment by the deadline? How many users of Healthcare.gov, thinking that they’ll be covered on January 1, won’t even realize that they’ve only completed half the process to make that happen? This is yet another landmine for O-Care buried on the 2014 calendar: Some segment of the population, wrongly thinking that their coverage is in effect, will go to the doctor in January only to find that they missed the payment deadline. Note to all bros in Colorado: No keg stands until February.
By the way, the White House’s new hope for Healthcare.gov is that it’ll be able to handle 80 percent of users by December 1st. That’d be ridiculous for any private commercial website, but it’s a moral victory as a salvage operation for a site built by a team whose ostensible leader eagerly reminds the media that he didn’t know much about it until it was too late. Exit quotation: “People don’t like to tell him bad news.”
Obama is going to need a third term to be around for it to be somewhat fixed.
If it hasn't been stress tested yet, it will be soon.
President Obama meet Lieutenant Colonel Nicholson.
ping
So there are clearly going to be many people who, very responsibly, were privately insured, had their policies canceled as of 01/01/14, can’t get through the hosed-up website to the point of paying their new higher premium by 12/15/13, thus find themselves without insurance for the month of January, all courtesy of the ignoramus in the White House, the incompetents in HHS and the moron Dems in the Congress. Some percentage of them will have a medical emergency or other problem during January and will be screwed. That should make for some fine Fall 2014 campaign commercials if a few Republicans can fog a mirror sufficiently to connect the dots.
This is why the population rebelled against Obamacare. All these bizarre deadlines, and supposedly this is necessary because our existing policies were arbitrary?? What an outrage.
In their supreme ignorance, the Obamanoids don’t realize that the IT consultants could keep dragging the ‘fixes’ on for months, and then ask for more money to fix the fixes, ad infinitum.
The typical method of an IT company who has won a gov’t contract is simple. If this a eighteen month contract to deliver “X”, then you basically hire only minimum numbers of personnel for the first six months.
It’s mostly just enough to design and write requirements. You don’t admit this to the gov’t but it’s a profit-building time.
Then you go into months six to ten, hiring up the staff and begin working toward the goal.
In fifty percent of the cases (at least the ones I viewed as a gov’t guy)...half the time, this tactic worked, and the company met the deadline with the product in marginal but workable condition. This was considered a success, although problems and bugs existed. You typically won contract number two to fix this deal....with this ‘success’. Yeah, strangely enough, we are happy with a marginal success.
In the other fifty percent? In the final five months, the company would realize they had bad planning and poor technical expertise. So they call in some hotshots and pay more for their services. Five or six guys with some brilliance....can overcome a really bad project in a matter of a couple of weeks. These guys charge a lot, but they tend to deliver.
My general impression is that this company’s technicians were already identifying problems and issues back six months prior to the deadline. You can’t admit this to the customer, who in this case....was passing even more changes in the final weeks of the project. It’s bad planning, and poor gov’t involvement.
The real key to this mess? Everything about this entire healthcare package...was absolutely dependent on the site working. Three years ago.....it was obvious. Never once, did this naive crew in the administration grasp the business side of the mess. The reason? None of them ever worked for a real business in life. Even now, they have no concept of insurance rates, and how they arrive at a cost factor each year for a company. Profits and profit margins? Same way....no idea.
This is kinda like inviting four guys from the local sports bar to take over major league baseball, and change the game entirely....from ticket costs to game rules, from hot dog sales to salary levels. It’d screw up the entire game to bring in naive people to run it.
Parkinson’s law: the work expands to fill the time (and funding) allowed to it. Seen most often in bureaucracy and federal contracting.
The Obamanauts really have their prehensile tails stuck in a crack this time.
Good.
My experience from the contractor side was that after the initial requirements and planning was done and the coding was started; that EACH additional new requirement added on between five and ten percent to the cost of the program as the requirements and planning process had to begin again to accommodate the change and then coding could start up again taking the new change into effect.
If the Changes came in the testing and verification process they could add up to fifty percent more onto the cost of the deliverable item. And also from my personal experience that most of the costs were from dealing with the overhead of all of the Government meetings and reviews .
I remember having an existing program that needed a single one line change in a format statement. My group would have been able to do it all, coding, compiling testing and verification within a day. Add the government in with all of it’s requirement and meeting and it ended up costing over a half a million dollars and six months.
On our side of the team, three people... Government side, well I was at one meeting and there were over forty Government people, IV&T contractors, etc. You have NO idea at how glad I was to get out of that bureaucratic swamp.
Government contracting is more about getting money obligated than meeting performance goals. Success for the government is spending the money allocated.
there are never going to be enough hours, days weeks, months or years to “repair” odumbocare. Put it in the trash can and repeal it forever. Stop throwing money at a dead horse.
By my calendar, there’s 11 days left.
If this a eighteen month contract to deliver “X”, then you basically hire only minimum numbers of personnel for the first six months.
It’s mostly just enough to design and write requirements...
On the other hand, there was no severe pushback when the requirements were delayed: the biggest contractor, given a crony sole source contract, was not going to rock the boat; there was no integration contractor to push back; and no one in CMS had experience in developing large software, so they didn’t know enough to push back.
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