Oregon Sues Oracle For "Abysmal" Healthcare Website 212
SpzToid (869795) writes The state of Oregon sued Oracle America Inc. and six of its top executives Friday, accusing the software giant of fraud for failing to deliver a working website for the Affordable Care Act program. The 126-page lawsuit claims Oracle has committed fraud, lies, and "a pattern of activity that has cost the State and Cover Oregon hundreds of millions of dollars". "Not only were Oracle's claims lies, Oracle's work was abysmal", the lawsuit said. Oregon paid Oracle about $240.3 million for a system that never worked, the suit said. "Today's lawsuit clearly explains how egregiously Oracle has disserved Oregonians and our state agencies", said Oregon Atty. Gen. Ellen Rosenblum in a written statement. "Over the course of our investigation, it became abundantly clear that Oracle repeatedly lied and defrauded the state. Through this legal action, we intend to make our state whole and make sure taxpayers aren't left holding the bag."
Oregon's suit alleges that Oracle, the largest tech contractor working on the website, falsely convinced officials to buy "hundreds of millions of dollars of Oracle products and services that failed to perform as promised." It is seeking $200 million in damages. Oracle issued a statement saying the suit "is a desperate attempt to deflect blame from Cover Oregon and the governor for their failures to manage a complex IT project. The complaint is a fictional account of the Oregon Healthcare Project."
Oregon's suit alleges that Oracle, the largest tech contractor working on the website, falsely convinced officials to buy "hundreds of millions of dollars of Oracle products and services that failed to perform as promised." It is seeking $200 million in damages. Oracle issued a statement saying the suit "is a desperate attempt to deflect blame from Cover Oregon and the governor for their failures to manage a complex IT project. The complaint is a fictional account of the Oregon Healthcare Project."
Reputation (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know if Oregon's suit has merit or not, but that sure sounds like my employer's experience with Oracle.
Re:Reputation (Score:5, Informative)
My employer unfortunately uses Oracle's HR management systems also. Worst piece of enterprise software I've ever seen. I have physical pain any time I have to use it. Their big iron databases used to be the shit, but even those seem to be going the way of the dodo as much cheaper, easier to use options are available these days.
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Judging by what you write, Oracle should give your company a whole bunch of red shirts as a freebie. If nothing else, it would be a great example of truth in advertising.
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Re:Reputation (Score:4, Interesting)
I've had multiple people tell me it's unethical to deliberately under-pay, but after months of trying to get a correct bill, should I go to collections over a wrong bill or pay one "in full" to stop the harassment of a billing department that can't get the right numbers?
About 5 years later, I heard is was still wrong more than right, though it did get better. It seemed like it would be difficult to get something so wrong. All the wrong parts showed up. Repeatedly. I saw the "order" and the delivery, and there weren't even the same number of items there, so it wasn't a part number mix up.
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Yep, lots of Oracle for my workplace too. :(
Re:Reputation (Score:5, Informative)
My university's management, financial and student software was upgraded by Oracle. Something like 70 million dollars later, the web frontend is a complete farce full of atrocious design decisions, confusing options and ridiculous limitations. The employee backend is so complicated and useless that you need a fucking MANUAL to use it, and most people need assistance to do basic tasks such as budgeting their funds.
Re:Reputation (Score:5, Insightful)
No, they go one better - be the most *expensive* bid, thereby convincing clueless MBAs of the superiority of your product, and then proceed to overcharge, delay, etc.
Car analogy: They sell you the most expensive car ever. Then tell you the engine costs extra. And then tell you the petrol tank is extra. And by the way don't put regular petrol in it, only aviation fuel. And isn't that logarithmic-scale odometer so much more science-y than those other brands of cars?
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Well, a log scale odometer would certainly help preserve resale value.
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And, because the warranty documentation is separate from the manual, it doesn't matter if you read and memorize the manual, you'll never see that suggestion/reocmmendation. Other than the silly "return the car to dealer if the tire pressure is low" comment.
Re:Reputation (Score:4, Interesting)
This is what happens when a customer doesn't want to own the system they are buying. Like a lot of places they probably had MBAs at the top who took the whole "not our core competency" thing too far. Yet again. Sure hire a vendor or vendors. But Own The Fucking System. Don't just let the vendors do what they want. It is a licence to push out shit with no oversight. I don't know for certain that this was the case here but that would be my guess.
Oracle was hired to implement the system and are of course software vendors. Even if it would mean fitting a square peg to a round hole, they'll try to use an all Oracle solution. This was a big enough project that the project management and architecture teams could have been separate from the software vendors. They almost always should be. Them and systems analysts should have been able to keep things in line if it wasn't all run by Oracle. If the implementation team was independent, I think it more likely they would use the right tools for the job. Blame the PHBs in Oregon for hiring Oracle. This should serve as a cautionary tale (which of course will be ignored).
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Re:Reputation (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know if Oregon's suit has merit or not, but that sure sounds like my employer's experience with Oracle.
This is pretty much SOP with any big custom system from a big company. Sure, they'll check off the boxes of the requirements, but it'll never work right until you fork over triple what the original contract was for, for "additional implementation." It's essentially extortion because at that point the organization is so many millions of dollars into it that they're willing to spend millions more to make it functional.
I'm very pleased that Oregon is not succumbing to this extortion and are fighting back. Oracle has claimed in the press that it was because the state added additional requirements midstream, but the problem isn't that they didn't implement those additional requirements, it's that they never delivered a functioning product, thus they did not fulfill a single requirement. Even if "it works" wasn't a specific requirement, it should be implied by the existence of any requirement which in itself requires the system to be functional. I hope Oregon gets back every penny they gave to Oracle, and I hope there's a legal reason they can get some massive penalties too.
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but it'll never work right until...
It'll never work right, period.
FTFY
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This is a good example of the sunk cost fallacy [wikipedia.org].
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This is a good example of the sunk cost fallacy [wikipedia.org].
"Sunk costs" are often abandoned in the business world, but rarely in the political world. Politicians would rather throw good money after bad than admit that they made a mistake. Sunk costs are usually abandoned only after a change in governing party, so the mistake can then be blamed on the other guys.
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Similar things happen in business. No manager wants their pet project to actually be declared an expensive failure. They'd rather throw more money at it until it can at least limp out of the starting gate.
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Yes, that's part of the tactic of the corps. No bureaucrat is going to cut his own project. Or his own budget.
So the corp over promises, and the bureaucrats sign on, thereby committing to the project and the relationship. The bureaucrats are never going to say "please cut the project where all my expertise and relationships are", even if he's not being greased under the table. Which the decision makers are.
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I don't know if Oregon's suit has merit or not, but that sure sounds like my employer's experience with Oracle.
This is pretty much SOP with any big custom system from a big company.
I know that we all like to paint with broad brushes, but back in the late 80s and 90s I worked for a large computer consulting outfit that did a reasonable job of delivering on time and on budget. But of course, it all depends on the individuals involved. The company had done an excellent job of hiring managers that hired technically competent people--and then trained them to estimate high to keep from causing problems later on.
It's funny how on the one hand we like to criticize pointy haired bosses fo
Re:Reputation (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know if Oregon's suit has merit or not, but that sure sounds like my employer's experience with Oracle.
Mine as well. We have contracts with hundreds of IT companies, and Oracle is by far the worst I've ever dealt with.
A list of things I've witnessed oracle do first hand that make me hate them:
1. Relegate "Bugs" to a "Bug list" that is so long you actually have an account you use to log into it and see the endless list of things wrong with their software they haven't gotten around to fixing yet.
2. Support that's so poor, if you cannot provide them with step by step instructions of exactly how to reproduce it as well as an actual solution to the problem in many cases they will promptly close the ticket and tell you "We were unable to reproduce your issue" I've received that response sometimes within minutes... suggesting they made no attempt at all to look for it. Your local cable company provides better support than oracle.
3. They intentionally deprecate features to try and prevent you from migrating to other systems. APIs, ODBC access, etc... Then offer to export the data for you for insane amounts of money (hundreds of thousands of dollars)
4. They actually sent a trainer to us to train us on how to manipulate their own support organization to work tickets. Seriously, 6hrs on how to get support to work your ticket...
5. With some products they patch, without notice, without testing. I walk in on Monday and find out a patch happened over the weekend I had no idea was going to happen, it brought several applications down. Then, when questioned about it postmortem, they actually said "Why would we notify you of these patches? There is no way they can cause a problem." When I pointed out that they just did, in fact, cause a problem, and that's why we were having this meeting, they said "Well this was a unique situation"
6. The few applications we have that aren't Oracle, keep getting bought by Oracle. Who then fires everyone, sticks their own, horrendous staff in their place and ruins a product we're locked into a 3yr contract for.
7. They have breached our contractually and legal obligated security policies no less than 7 times in the past 2 years. Not minor breaches, major ones. In one case access to hosted services they had was controlled by a whitelist. They decided, again without notice, to introduce a 2nd whitelist of API access, and default it to allow all. As a result access to the API for the service was wide open to the entire internet for months before we found out by accident what they had done. They pointed out that they had made the change public by creating a new webpage documenting the new setting, but no, they hadn't actually informed any customers the page existed and the patch that had been applied to implement the setting had been done so without any notifications being sent to anyone.
I could go on and on... but suffice it to say Oracle is the devil, they hate their customers, want to steel their money and are by far the worst Tech company I've ever dealt with. Burn in hell Oracle.
Lawsuits (Score:5, Interesting)
I have no doubt at all that Oracle committed fraud and lied a lot. I have no doubt Oregon's project management failed to give adequate oversight to the project, failed to adequately specify the project, and repeatedly changed what little specification they provided.
Neither matters. I have no doubt this lawsuit will ultimately fail, because the Oregon attorney general doesn't have the technical ability to prove the fraud and lies. The state has already proven they don't understand what they're doing. We're about to get a second demonstration.
Good answer! Fraud is their main source of profit? (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, Oracle has been through this perhaps thousands of times. Apparently the major profit center for companies like Oracle is being late and more expensive than predicted. For example, see this quote from the book, Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment [google.com]:
"... a recent General Accounting Office report on U.S. military equipment procurement concluded that only 1% of major military purchases involving high technology were delivered on time and on budget."
That book says the problem is due to a sociological mistake. My understanding is that it is entirely intended, a way of making money from the largely hidden military purchases of the U.S. government. For the U.S. government, killing people is an enormous, extremely profitable business.
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Apparently the major profit center for companies like Oracle is being late and more expensive than predicted.
This 100 times. I am amazed again and again that big government projects are almost guaranteed to be over budget and late, and I don't mean 10% in either case. After having this 5000 times, which idiots write the contracts that still don't contain massive penalties for those cases? Grab them by the balls when they promise you the heavens and tell them to deliver or shut up.
Nothing short of corruption can explain this, because I refuse to believe that someone can be this stupid and at the same time still rem
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Because instead of holding corporations to their promises and showing them who owns the tanks, governments in the west have spent the past 10 years selling themselves to the cheapest bidder, with treaties allowing corporations to sue governments if they dare pass laws that impact profits.
Sometimes I wish we had a king with a big ego, who'd on as much as the proposal of such a treaty arrest all those corporate bigshots and hang them publicly.
Re:Good answer! Fraud is their main source of prof (Score:4, Insightful)
"... a recent General Accounting Office report on U.S. military equipment procurement concluded that only 1% of major military purchases involving high technology were delivered on time and on budget."
That book says the problem is due to a sociological mistake. My understanding is that it is entirely intended, a way of making money from the largely hidden military purchases of the U.S. government. For the U.S. government, killing people is an enormous, extremely profitable business.
The book is wrong, it isn't a "sociological mistake." The problems tend to come from changing requirements (from the gov and events), under bidding (by the company), stop and start funding and various directives (from the Congress), legal challenges from the losing competitors, and the nature of the procurement system.
And no, killing people is not "an enormous, extremely profitable business" for the government. It is quite the opposite.
Correction: (Score:2)
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Now you're catching on.
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And no, killing people is not "an enormous, extremely profitable business" for the government. It is quite the opposite.
Killing people - not so profitable. Threatening to kill them - very profitable. That's where the power is at. Things are the way they are because most people support men with guns making it that way.
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Every law is an implicit threat of violence, backed by guns.
Doesn't matter anymore. (Score:2, Funny)
Larry Ellison just bought Oregon.
Holy crap (Score:2, Informative)
I'm pretty sure for 240 million I'd be able to do it from my bedroom.
Deflect Blame? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Deflect Blame? (Score:2)
No, they didn't. Oregon acted as the systems integrator and overall project manager. Oracle was the main contractor but not the integrator.
It's a complot (Score:2)
Re:It's a complot (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's a complot (Score:4, Interesting)
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No, it isn't.
Total cost for health care is far higher than before and the end result is pretty much exactly the same as before. The basic coverage you end up with on the low end is so shitty that its effectively useless for the poor people who need it, and to top it off, now the people who pay for it all, pay far more.
If you want socialized health care, fucking socialize it and take private business out of the equation entirely, it will never work as long as there greedy businesses mixed in with it.
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If you want socialized health care, fucking socialize it and take private business out of the equation entirely, it will never work as long as there greedy businesses mixed in with it.
Yes, only people who offer value in free exchange are the greedy ones. Men with guns who take they want aren't greedy at all.
Re:It's a complot (Score:5, Informative)
While I agree, in general, with the claims of how shitty Obamacare is...
I have friends who now have health insurance, and another who has finally been able to leave his old employer (to start his own company and become self-employed), because of Obamacare. Specifically, two of these friends are cancer survivors (throat and cervical), one has fibromyalgia, and one has a chronic autoimmune disorder whose name I forget. They wouldn't have been able to buy health insurance, otherwise; nobody was willing to offer it. So, for them personally, Obamacare *is* better than what they had before.
Of course, there are a lot of less-fucked-up ways of addressing that issue.
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Yes, the Kulaks are always sabotaging the plans of the Party!
Hire Engineers as Employees. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm starting to think that State, Provincial, Reigonal, Local and Federal governments should Purchase Technologies from companies, and then hire their own Salaried Engineers to actually handle the operations. Stop creating these service contracts and don't let this nonsense go on.
Re:Hire Engineers as Employees. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what we do with Oracle and we're actually doing pretty well with them. We only let them build the dev environment, train our staff, and create documentation. The other environments are built entirely by the people they trained using the documentation provided, and once we are confident we can rebuild the system even if Oracle vanished off the face of the earth, we send the consultants on their way. This approach should be done with *any* vendor though.
The blame lies with Oregon (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The blame lies with Oregon (Score:5, Insightful)
And to top it off, somebody in Oregon selected Oracle to be their vendor in the first place. I'll eagaerly await the replies here from folks whose experience with Oracle was that they were on-time, on-budget, went above-and-beyond in the name of customer service, and were a pleasure to work with. Too bad no company in the entire state of Oregon was qualified to build a database-backed website!
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So Oracle took Oregon's money, and the hit on their own reputation. I wonder if it was worth it?
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Instead, Oregon placed a gag order on everyone involved in the project to hide the problems from the public.
That's the way government solves problems - point guns at people to shut them up. Problem solved!
Not all states failed (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a success [medicalnews.md] story about Kentucky's Kynect Exchange.
They need not have worried. Over the past year, Kentucky’s health care website has proved to be a huge success. More than a half-million Kentucky residents have signed up for the Bluegrass State’s version of Obamacare. A majority of Kentuckians approve of it. That this has happened in a deeply red state is unexpected but hardly an accident.
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Re:Experience with Kynect (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll "third" it. My wife needed to use Kynect when I retired. At first there were several bumps. Eventually she was put into contact with a "manager" who looked at the system output for her case, said "nope, not your fault, that looks like a system error", and promptly while my wife was on the telephone with her, over-rode the system to correct it. Things have been fine since.
I suspect Kentucky isn't rich or pretentious enough to try to do everything Oregon might. For development work, it's not a bad mindse
Re:Experience with Kynect (Score:4, Insightful)
Manual overrides are key to most designs, particularly in new systems.
It's not going to all work perfectly. Not gonna happen. Make sure a person can brute force a solution. You can automate more when the requirements are better understood, and have stabilized.
The goal should be a *process* that works, whatever the tech, and that includes *people*.
typical (Score:3, Funny)
My onetime employer had Oracle come in and take over managing their entire employee database system.
At one point a manager asked what it would take to have the letter that the system created to be sent out accepting a new employee changed to add a yellow hilight over a couple of important lines in the Word document.
They told him it would take six hours of programmer time at $200/hour.
He bought a 69 cent hilighter instead.
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It will take a lot of new hires for intern time spent with a hiliter to add up to $1200.
Deflect blame? (Score:4, Informative)
"from Cover Oregon and the governor for their failures to manage a complex IT project."
Err, excuse me - if Oracle are the contractor its up to THEM to manage the fecking project. Why the hell should the governor be hands on with this? Do they think he's also down at every roadworks checking the spades?
Usually when you hire a big company like Oracle you give them the requirements, pay them money and they're supposed to deliver the goods, so Oracle whining that they apparently weren't given good enough management is pathetic.
I wonder what are the odds they used some cheap indian labour who can just about switch on a computer much less deliver a working program. Sorry if some people find that racist, but indian coders in my experience are universally bloody useless.
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Err, excuse me - if Oracle are the contractor its up to THEM to manage the fecking project.
If they're left to do so, yes. I suspect they weren't, not fully. there was constant meddling and scope change and feature creep and "wait, we have THIS data too" shit being flung around like there's no tomorrow.
Usually when you hire a big company like Oracle you give them the requirements, pay them money and they're supposed to deliver the goods
Absolutely correct. In theory. In practice, I'm yet to see a project involving multiple people which goes through its lifecycle like theory says it should. No wonder most wildly successful projects are being handled by a one-man team.
I wonder what are the odds they used some cheap indian labour who can just about switch on a computer much less deliver a working program. Sorry if some people find that racist, but indian coders in my experience are universally bloody useless.
Fairly small. They used mixed teams, which is actually worse becau
Authority grant (Score:2)
If Oracle doesn't have the authority to compel teams of government employees to finalize their requirements, then they by definition Oracle isn't running the project.
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Usually when you hire a big company like Oracle you give them the requirements, pay them money and they're supposed to deliver the goods, so Oracle whining that they apparently weren't given good enough management is pathetic.
If Oracle was hired to deliver a database, and they did, but it doesn't work because someone else didn't do their job, then is it really Oracle's fault it doesn't work?
An Oregonian (Score:4, Interesting)
To be honest, our state can certainly screw up just like all the rest and on various levels. Just google Dynamite Whale for one example.
On the other hand, my experiences with Oracle and what I've heard from other people that had to deal with them, are far less than stellar.
Right now I'm betting some politician made some stupid mistakes that Oracle didn't bother to even attempt to correct because all they could see was $$. Which of course was compounded by Oracle then going on in a slipshod milk the government cash cow way. The end result being this F-N mess.
How to recover from this? Honestly, I don't really know, especially because we haven't been told what the exact problems are with the system. Sure, we've been told lots of the symptoms, but not the actual problems. (The difference between someone saying my car makes this "kchunk-wnnnng noise", vs "my car's timing belt is slipping".)
One suggestion that might be necessary is to throw out the old code, and go talk to someone with a good working version and license that one for a reasonable fee then rebrand and localize it. (Maybe Kentucky's version.) And no, a reasonable fee isn't what they paid for it if it's something they had developed. Maybe there are other states with lousy versions, and they could all license a good working version. It would sure as hell simplify things going forward for all of them.
Big Companies and Government Contracts (Score:3)
What you get with Big Companies is lots of Lawyers. There is more money to be made doing exactly what the contract says then doing the job correct. If you do exactly what you are asked to do in the worst way possible you get paid once to do this and keep getting paid to support and modify.
Oregon IT mgmt was great (Score:2)
As a consultant I worked on Oregon's Medicaid system, directly with Oregon senior IT management. It was the first government work I'd done after swearing I never would again 20 years previous, for reasons many are familiar with.
It was shocking; those folks were top notch! No drama, no politics, no crap - just smart people who came to work to get things done, and did it well. I actually looked forward to meetings with the Oregon team because they were that sharp.
I can't say how many of those people m
why sue the execs? (Score:2)
Re:Because they could't sue the Government (Score:4, Funny)
"What procedure was used to select Oracle on the market of solution vendors?"
"Well, their name kind of starts like our name, so we thought they'd be the best for us. We've also heard there's a lot of trees in their software. We like trees."
H1-B and outsource are responsible for this (Score:3, Interesting)
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The contractors governments often do business off-shore the work and that is one of the reasons why the projects are so shitty. But there are other reasons. Government agencies don't operate in the same way businesses do. For example, the requirements documents are NEVER frozen. Some reptilian politician gets a burr up his ass, writes some new regulations, and *POOF* the requirements have to be changed and any code already written has to be either dumped or changed to reflect it. Also, when the law cha
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Government agencies don't operate in the same way businesses do. For example, the requirements documents are NEVER frozen. Some reptilian politician gets a burr up his ass, writes some new regulations, and *POOF* the requirements have to be changed and any code already written has to be either dumped or changed to reflect it.
And even if the requirement documents never changed, even if they were chiseled in granite, they'd still be shit.
When doesn't this happen in government IT? Shit requirements in, they're run through a blender every other month, and a system slowly grows, while the bureaucrats sign off again and again, because he who spots the problem is held to have created the problem.
Re:Because they could't sue the Government (Score:5, Insightful)
A big part of the blame should go to Oregon for trying to start with a big, complex site. Of all the states that implement Obamacare Insurance Exchanges, Oregon's is widely considered the worst, after spending $240M. Kentucky's is widely considered the best. It was ready on day one, and has run without major problems since. Kentucky spent about $8M, or 3% of what Oregon spent. Software development works best with a small, lean team of good developers. Before embarking on this project, the Oregon governor should have read The Mythical Man Month [wikipedia.org].
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Oh sure, share some blame, that's fine. But that doesn't make Oracle suddenly innocent. Fraud is still fraud, even if you cheat someone dumb.
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I've got a hunch you typed that statement by hitting these keys:
F1 in Congress that passed the law to begin with.
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It's public record who passed the law. The Democrats own that law, lock, stock, and barrel, for better or worse.
Re:Because they could't sue the Government (Score:4, Informative)
A big part of the blame should go to the Democrats in Congress that passed the law requiring the site to begin with.
Except that the site was NOT required. Most states did NOT implement their own site, and either default to the federal site or formed a regional partnership.
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A big part of the blame should go to the Democrats in Congress that passed the law requiring the site to begin with.
Except that the site was NOT required. Most states did NOT implement their own site, and either default to the federal site or formed a regional partnership.
So they blew millions on a lousy website instead of forcing their citizen to use the lousy website on which the federal government blew millions. I'm sure the Oregon people are happy to have paid twice for the same garbage.
Meanwhile Oracle's stock is up almost 1/3 this year. At least some people made money with this healthcare thing.
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Except that the site was NOT required. Most states did NOT implement their own site, and either default to the federal site or formed a regional partnership.
In order to qualify legally for the subsidies under the law each state had to set up its own exchange. If the state is going to have an exchange then people need to have a way to access it. How are you going to do that without a web site? Snail mail? Telephone? Currier?
Obamacare’s Architect Agreed That Only State Exchanges Could Offer Subsidies [nationalreview.com]
There are many states where people are not legally eligible for subsidies. They have been illegally receiving them, but they shouldn't count on that to l
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Obama seems to think he can spend money as he sees fit, contrary to law. Congress decides spending & passes the budget, not the President.
Then reality has shown him to be correct. Rules are enforced on the ruled by the rulers. Rulers don't enforce rules on themselves. Rules are for the peasants.
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hmmmm...suppose you spend $1 Billion to develop a new drug...just about $1 worth of chemicals per pill. How much are you going to sell it for? Care to make back your investment? Overhead for factories to make it? Promotion so that doctors know about it? Health care for your employees? A retirement plan for your employees?
The drug companies are a bunch of greedy suits. However, attempting to simplify the problem using your reasoning doesn't help anyone.
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How about colchicine? It cost about $8/month. Then, one company did a million dollar study, generally considered to have contributed nothing to medical knowledge, and so got temporary exclusivity from the FDA and suddenly it costs $450 for the same thing.
The $1 cost BTW was already covering the factory, employees, etc. The rest is gravy and marketing.
Much of the research is taken care of by universities operating under a federal grant. By all rights, that research belongs to the people already.
Based on the
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and so got temporary exclusivity from the FDA
It's the guns of the government that caused the problem. When the government no longer enforces medical monopolies, we'll stop paying monopoly prices.
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Government and regulations have their place, but the FDA is well off the deep end. They seem to be all about expanding their power base and seem consider their primary purpose to be more of a nuisance than a reason to be. I notice the agency pocketed $45 million in the colchicine case, all of which will come out of the hides of gout sufferers.
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In that case I have to agree with you. That doesn't make the general argument valid, though. You are arguing that because a known generic with known characteristics is safe, an unknown drug should also be allowed. I've got to disagree.
OTOH, you can point to a multitude of cases where the system of regulations was abused. And in many cases I'll say, yes, that was clearly abuse. But your original statement vastly oversimplifies the case.
FWIW, many drugs have been re-licensed by removing a compbination of
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Considering that doctors have been successfully and safely using colchicine since before there was an FDA, and continued to do so throughout it's existence under the grandfather clause based on well established guidelines, No, I was not and am not particularly interested in the FDA's rubber stamp. Particularly not a rubber stamp that would cost each and every individual prescribed thousands a year.
The studies really didn't do any more than provide that rubber stamp. They revealed nothing that hadn't already
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I'm pretty sure that interactions with drugs created or repurposed in the recent past don't have a history going back millennia.
The drug ritonavir, which is used to treat AIDs, for example, was only approved in 1996 and it apparently has an interaction with colchicine. The shamans aren't going to be a help with learning that.
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That is no good reason to claw back a long time generic drug. Instead, the producer of the new combination drug should deal with that.
Then there's the people who won't be able to afford any combination of either drug now and will be forced to do without or make do with crocus tea (Hellllloooooooooo shaman!) rather than a well controlled manufactured drug.
Of course, for those who can afford it, it's physicians, not shaman who give them the drugs and watch for side effects and interactions. In fact, that's ho
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suppose you spend $1 Billion to develop a new drug...just about $1 worth of chemicals per pill. How much are you going to sell it for?
Perhaps we should have a system for funding drug development in some way other than per-pill prices.
If 10,000 people have a deadly disease that can be cured with one pill, and one of them is Bill Gates and the rest are poor, then you could maximize profits by charging a billion dollars for the pill, and letting the other 9,999 people die. That is clearly a market failure. This is an extreme example, but is similar in principle to how medicine is actually priced.
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Healthcare should have never been allowed to become for profit.
You win the Thug of the Day award. Yes, people shouldn't be *allowed* to exchange value for value based on their own preferences. The government should step in and shoot them. Yay! What a Brave New World!
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It's costs that much because men with guns prevent competition from others who would provide those chemicals at a lower cost.
When I'm free to purchase medical care from anyone willing to provide it, it will be time to talk about market failure in health care. Until then, the medical mafia is just another shakedown operation enabled by government guns.
Health care is cheap. Government control is expensive.
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The free market won't work either. The FDA came in to being when the free market gave us a children's sulfa elixir filled with anti-freeze.
Note though that it's not just the FDA. Generic drugs, various medical devices and supplies are all vastly over-priced right down to crutches and tongue depressors.
Then there's the use of expensive still patented drugs in cases where equally good generics are just as usable at a tenth the price. That's not caused by an excess of regulation.
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Actually, approval does not in practice require the new drug to be as good as or better than the original in any way. It has to show the basic safety and be more effective than placebo.
In many cases, the inexpensive generic isn't even tried before jumping to the expensive option unless the patient brings it up or, in some cases, insists.
My objection is not to the me too drugs in and of themselves, it is to the order they are tried in practice.
The insurance companies are right (for once) to push back when th
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That's why there needs to be a reasonable middle ground. It's one thing if that $1 of chemicals costs $5 or $10 inb the capsule. It's quite another if it costs $32,000.
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Place the realm blame where it belongs and leave Oracle alone.
Who? Lotus Notes? Bill Gates? Nixon?
This is classic application of Hanlon's Razor: Never ascribe to malice that which can be best explained by incompetence.
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Place the realm blame where it belongs and leave Oracle alone.
Who? Lotus Notes? Bill Gates? Nixon?
Nixon. I say we blame Nixon. After all, he was the first sitting president to propose national health care [kaiserhealthnews.org] (and of all ironies, Ted Kennedy [washingtonpost.com] helped spike it.)
Re:Driving home the point (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Oracle sucks. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Oracle sucks. (Score:4, Informative)
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Nope. A website that has to hook into a bunch of poorly maintained, poorly documented databases. That's the hard part.
That they screwed up the web site portion of it is typical Oracle however. Unfortunately, like in any major disaster, there are going to be a number of interlocking pieces, numerous bad decisions and enough legal boilerplate to cover the world ten feet deep.
The only people standing at the end will be the lawyers.
Re: absurd (Score:3, Insightful)
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Nope. A website that has to hook into a bunch of poorly maintained, poorly documented databases. That's the hard part.
This kind of crap is par for the course. I've had to figure out poorly designed databases without documentation, and it didn't cost millions of dollars to do that. Admittedly, insurance company big iron is probably much hairier to deal with than what I'm used to... but $240 million worth? Sorry, I just don't see how this adds up.
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That is "Really Big-O" notation, to which you can add, "Oh no!"
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