Obamacare and Middle-Wheel-Wheelbarrows

davecb writes "The Obamacare sign-up site was a classic example of managers saying 'not invented here' and doing everything wrong, as described in Poul-Henning Kamp's Center Wheel for Success, at ACM Queue." It's not just a knock on the health-care finance site, though: "We are quick to dismiss these types of failures as politicians asking for the wrong systems and incompetent and/or greedy companies being happy to oblige. While that may be part of the explanation, it is hardly sufficient. ... [New technologies] allow us to make much bigger projects, but the actual success/failure rate seems to be pretty much the same."

No dude...

[BringsApples]

...The website "roll-out" was an utter failure, plain and simple. There are so many websites out there that do far more complex operation, and they seem to have very little problem. I wasn't involved in the "roll-out" of the government's healthcare website, so I know jack-diddly about the problems that they faced. But from what I know about websites, especially ones like that one, is that it's a simple matter of input from the user, and then a matter of storage of that input, and maybe some calculations along the way - all very basic stuff for today's world. I went to the website and the damn thing had major problems that made me think that it was trying to do a lot of on-the-fly operations behind the scene that wasn't syncing up correctly, maybe I'm wrong, but that was my feeling.

However, that being said, I cannot see why the website "failure" had such an impact on the "unrolling" of the actual healthcare change. They had a toll-free number to call and operators that would do everything over the phone, very nice people I might add. Why the site didn't simply display the toll-free number is a good question. Hell, maybe they could have simply had an online-chat window pop up. Again, I wasn't a part of the staff that was tasked with this website, so there are things that I don't know.

Re:Why not call it its actual name?

[Okian Warrior]

I mean, you folks at Slashdot should have called it the Affordable Care Act website then reminded us that it's also known as Obamacare. But to call it what it isn't in the first sentence of introduction is [very] unfortunate!

Is this a misdirect?

I'm only asking because I'm on the lookout for techniques to derail a discussion. A "misdirect" is calling attention to something irrelevant but intended to provoke an emotional response. It's used to push more-relevant posts down the page - hopefully below the fold.

Already got a +3 rating, it takes up a full two column-inches. I'm curious to see how many respond, and whether they get modded up.

(No one publishes guidelines for this sort of thing, so I have to ask.)

Re:Shock!

[immaterial]

The article doesn't actually seem to say much of anything (insights into stupid European wheelbarrow design notwithstanding). And there's this:

I looked at one of the actual laws that make up Obamacare ... After a few pages I ran into this definition of patient decision aid:

(1) PATIENT DECISION AID—The term patient decision aid' means an educational tool that helps patients, caregivers, or authorized representatives understand and communicate their beliefs and preferences related to their treatment options, and to decide with their health care provider what treatments are best for them based on their treatment options, scientific evidence, circumstances, beliefs, and preferences. ...

Unless Congress thinks of teachers as "educational tools," I think we can take it as written here that they expect this to be some kind of computer program. ... These paragraphs legislate that Obamacare will fund research in heavy-duty state-of-the-art artificial intelligence—I somehow doubt that is what Congress intended it to say. I posit that Congress worried about having enough doctors and nurses for this new health care, so they wanted to use computers to cut down the talking and explaining. In other words, they want to save manpower—by replacing the front man on the handbarrow with a wheel.

It looks to me like his interpretation of the law is extremely ridiculous. As I read it, it applies just as well to a simple brochure, ie. "Your Treatment Options for Prostate Cancer..." that is required to be understandable to the patient or caregiver (in their native language and not overly technical) so they can make an educated choice about their own treatment.

The author of the article is the one attaching the unnecessarily complicated wheel to this particular example.

What about the wheelbarrow?

[Yxven]

As interesting as it is to guess why another waterfall government IT project failed, I'd rather know why we aren't using wheelbarrows with wheels closer to the center. As a guy who has mostly used wheelbarrows for moving concrete, having the wheel support the majority of the load instead of half (or whatever) sounds like a huge advantage.

The Wikipedia article on wheelbarrows suggests "However, the lower carrying surface made the European wheelbarrow clearly more useful for short-haul work." Does that reason really pan out? Can anyone think of any other reasons?

Re:Why not call it its actual name?

[LordLimecat]

Ive heard it called Obamacare on NPR too, but no-- continue your rant.

Re:No dude...

[Ken D]

That shipped sailed long ago.

Everyone has to pay for trash disposal. You have no choice. You can't burn it, you can't pile it on your property.

You either haul it to a private landfill and pay them. Or you pay a private hauler to take it away. Or you pay taxes that pay a private hauler with a government contract to haul it away.

Anything else is illegal.

Re:Developers are but the least part of the proble

[Anonymous Coward]

True, the code for that ill-fated website was really out-of-this-world in term of lousiness, but in the whole scheme of things the developers play but a very minor role in that disaster.

The ones who should shoulder the most blame are the people who awarded the entire project (without proper bidding process) to a totally incompetent company due to political reason ( read: cronyism )

The ones who should shoulder the second largest portion of the blame are those who, despite receiving untold millions in funding, they hired totally incompetent people to be in charge of that project.

It was awarded to a company that specialized in landing government contracts. To the person in the bidding process, it would appear to be awarded to a company with a proven track record.

Now that it's all over, we know that that company over-promises and under-delivers. What is new? Not much, except that now you have yet another excuse to bitch about your country, making you seem even more "American" as it is viewed from the eyes of the world.

I'll bet there's 20 posts already about how the real crime is the nationalized health care, something that is laughable that a country with your spending on healthcare and your resources can't provide to it's citizens. America is starting to not look like the land of the free, but the land of the feeble-minded and petty.

Re:Developers are but the least part of the proble

[jedidiah]

> It was awarded to a company that specialized in landing government contracts. To the person in the bidding process, it would appear to be awarded to a company with a proven track record.

In other words, the entire system is corrupt just as the OP implied.

Re:No dude...

[phantomfive]

FWIW the trash thing is local, whereas the healthcare thing is national.

It seems like a small detail, but it's essentially the central debate the country has been having since 1776 or before. How much power should the national government have compared to local governments (and citizens)?