HealthCare.gov Can't Handle Appeals of Errors 208
Posted
by
samzenpus
from the that's-some-good-work-there-lou dept.
from the that's-some-good-work-there-lou dept.
PapayaSF writes "The Washington Post reports that roughly 22,000 people have claimed they were charged too much, steered into the wrong insurance program, or denied coverage, but the HealthCare.gov website cannot handle appeals. They've filled out seven-page forms and mailed them to a federal contractor's office in Kentucky, where they were scanned and entered, but workers at CMS cannot read them because that part of the system has not been built. Other missing aspects are said to have higher priorities: completing the electronic payment system for insurers, the connections with state Medicaid programs, and the ability to adjust coverage to accommodate major changes such as new babies. People with complaints about mistakes have been told to 'return to the Web site and start over.'"
Coders (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Or instead, maybe they should have hired architects, engineers, and/or developers and not "coders" or "programmers".
No. They need more people who know how to do this [programmin...fucker.com].
Re:Coders (Score:4, Insightful)
On an unrelated note, your signature is unrelated to the argument it makes. Correlation is not causation. That's a truism. Correlation is correlation. The statement which actually says something is "correlation does not imply causation."
Re: (Score:2)
That's EXACTLY how you get to a disaster -- you hire people who get off on coding and write throw-away crap "because it works." It works once. And, usually, only on your desktop.
Sure, one-off "because it works" coding is one way to get to a disaster. Another way is to spend so much time on "development methodology" as opposed to actual coding that you can't possibly produce a working application before the deadline. My bets are on the latter in this case.
On an unrelated note, your signature is unrelated to the argument it makes. Correlation is not causation. That's a truism. Correlation is correlation. The statement which actually says something is "correlation does not imply causation."
I'd have used the longer version except it wouldn't fit in Slashdot's .sig limit. ;) Either way, I stand by my statement--both "correlation is not causation" and "correlation does not imply causation" are true, but if you use ei
Re:Coders (Score:5, Insightful)
It always seemed to me that people who insist on the distinction are missing the fact that it's the "coding" part of the job that matters in the end. Yes, it's good to have a sane design and so on, but that only has value because it makes for better code. And save me from architecture astronauts who don't write code any more, and so produce designs of no value whatsoever.
Re:Coders (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Coders (Score:4, Interesting)
hehehehe.
Laughed out loud. Very fresh and humorous.
For a project this size, you really need multiple layers of architects and then multiple layers of coders.
I'm sure this will be fine in another year or so. I'm amazed they got so much done under the conditions and constraints I've heard they worked under.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm amazed they got so much done under the conditions and constraints I've heard they worked under.
I agree: the blame here falls at the highest levels, where the "conditions and constraints" come from.
Re: (Score:2)
They gave themselves over three years to implement the website, but choose to spend most of that "refining" their design.
Then, once they implemented the website (the parts of the website they choose to implement, saving "payment" and "appeal" backend systems for later), they allowed themselves 3-6 months for every uninsured American to get on to the website and apply for coverage. If there was a problem with the website, they had a plan - they had paper applications, call centers, and in-person navigators t
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Code without design will do something, but it may bear no resemblance to solving the problem or even running to completion. I'll agree that coding has to happen at some point or nothing happens.
I'll also agree that architects should do at least some coding in order to remain grounded in reality.
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
The real answer it obvious, it would have been a whole lot simpler to go with universal health care, charge a 1% premium on everyones income and tie it to the existing social security number. Nope, the Uncle Tom dope had to go with stuffing of private insurance company profits and corporate executive bonuses and then those executives still turned around and attacked the idiot because the crazy complicated scheme eliminated junk policies (ones that charged fees but basically provided zero coverage). Insuran
maybe they should of give the them time and other (Score:2)
maybe they should of give the them time and other stuff needed to do there job.
I head QA only had a week and the backend was a big mess with it taking a long time to get info on data formats.
Re:maybe they should of give the them time and oth (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe if they got 9 women pregnant they could have had a baby in 1 month.
Re: (Score:2)
Or real managers who know how to manage projects rather than just setting deadlines and telling the powers that be that everything's under control.
Re: (Score:2)
Do you really believe they didn't?
My guess, the people running the project on the government side did a piss poor job of running the project, had no idea of what they were building, and provided the contractor with conflicting and confusing information, and probably kept changing their priorities as they went.
I'm skeptical the change in who is implementing it will address any of these issues. Because the people overseeing it will likely still be inep
Re:Coders (Score:5, Funny)
Yesterday's technology, tomorrow.
Re:Coders (Score:5, Informative)
Whoa, there's reason to give the Healthcare.gov developers a hard time. But Accenture to be fair has been on the job what... 2 weeks? You can't turn around a 3 year project in 2 weeks.
Re: Coders (Score:5, Funny)
Not with that attitude you can't.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
You must not be particularly familiar with what it actually has to do if you think that 1 month is sufficient for a prototype.
Re: (Score:3)
Accenture has a well-deserved reputation on a great many projects for decades of being only slightly better than stale toast at their projects.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
OK then:
Accenture...
Yesterday's technology, next month.
Re:Coders (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't hire a coder to do a software developer's job. Developers Developers Developers.
Quite backwards, in my experience. The more shit you feel the need to add to your title, the less capable you probably are.
If you're a programmer you can probably program.
If you're a software engineer, you probably think you can program, but really rely almost entirely on other programmers, an IDE, someone else's libraries, tools, APIs, etc. to do the real work while you focus on promising users and PHBs functionality and changes without understanding how shit actual works or what the impact of those changes you promised will be.
If you're a project manager, you probably programmed something a decade ago and have unrealistic expectations of how shit and people will and should work.
If your title includes references to "as a service", "cloud hosting", "rich media", etc., then you're really nothing more than a middle man selling someone else's shit to idiots who don't realize they're buying marketing fluff they don't want or need.
This applies to all sectors. You can be the regional head of marketing and development for social media by being a 38 year old overweight lumpus if you've been at the company a while and have a nephew who has a Twitter account.
BTW, I thought I was making "lumpus" up. http://dictionary.reference.co... [reference.com] That shit just sounded right.
Re: (Score:2)
Or if you are a software engineer you don't do it the simple, inelegant way that will cause problems a few months down the line. Moving on in to the project manager category, it is expected that some amount of technical skill is sacrificed in the name of developing the business skills needed for the position.
There are two main tracks of progression within the software development field, technical and management. Technical moves up the level of skill and ability to solve complex problems (though sometimes
I have been advising (Score:3, Insightful)
I have been advising anyone who will listen to keep their personal information the hell away from that site. My assumption is the fraudsters that eventually got hold of it would be criminals, not the government and the insurers themselves.
In retrospect I am really not surprised.
Re: (Score:2)
I have been advising anyone who will listen to keep their personal information the hell away from that site.
Fortunately, it plugs into the Federal databases for all sorts of information to verify account info (from what I understand). So the website has access to your information by default.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm curious by what criteria you actually distinguish criminals, fraudsters, and government? The distinction has grown increasingly fuzzy or, perhaps, irrelevant.
Re:I have been advising (Score:4, Funny)
I have my own insurance for the first time in my life because of the ACA and this site; for free. I couldn't be happier.
Maybe someday you'll have a name, and a personality. Then people can take your anecdotes seriously.
Re: I have been advising (Score:5, Interesting)
Different AC who has also used the site to get coverage after being laid off. It worked as well as any modern moderately intimate "create an account" web experience. More used friendly (and less intrusive) than the average online job application.
I happen to live in one of the Red states that had been trying torpedo "ObamaCare", fwiw.
I hope you don't are never forced to resort to healthcare.gov, and I am sure there are plenty if people who have problems with it (like any other online or off line process), but it isn't the absolute failure that it is made out to be.
I'd like to see any private project do better when 50% of both management and customers are hoping for failure.
Re: (Score:2)
I hope you don't are never forced to resort to healthcare.gov...
But I am being forced to buy something I don't want.
"But it's for your own good!" Fuck that.
"Oh, you don't need it personally? Well, then you must buy ObamaCare for other people". Fuck that too.
I can't wait to hear the screams from the ObamaCare devotees when the inevitable Republican administration comes along and makes people buy stuff from their corporate overlords.
"That's not fair!!! I don't want or need a Halliburton morality detector!" Too fucking bad. You shouldn't have voted for that crap. Appa
Please fasten your seatbelts (Score:2)
Please fasten your seatbelts, we seem to be encountering some turbulence.
in the private sector (Score:5, Funny)
If you created this huge of a disaster you would have lost the contract, and most likely have to pay back any payments made. You would also be on a virtual blacklist as being completely incompetent.
But here in the federal government.. it doesn't work that way. You get rewarded.
Re:in the private sector (Score:5, Informative)
When I worked for a Fortune 50 company, we once had corporate IT charge us $1.7 million to tell us that it would cost $4.5 million to make a simple e-commerce web site for a division that had a catalog of 2000 products and did about 250 orders per day. Everyone on that team was praised and the local GM that refused to go forward with the project was eventually pushed out. The project eventually happened.
They now have a maintenance team of five people dedicated full time to that web site.
Re: (Score:2)
Yea, our vendor now charges us $10,000 to give us a QUOTE on potential projects. It's kind of a joke at this point.
Re: (Score:2)
Ummm... Wow.
The only way I could see that is if the 2k products each has at least 10 options and the average order is like 10k items at an average price of $100 per.
Of course, with purchases that big you'd generally be holding parties and/or sending personal reps to the purchasers.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, they can sue. Does not mean they will win, but they can. They just don't, at least at the federal level that i have heard of.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
If you created this huge of a disaster you would have lost the contract, and most likely have to pay back any payments made. You would also be on a virtual blacklist as being completely incompetent.
Sorry, I have to call Bullshit on this. Shit like that is common place in private sector, too. The bigger the project, the more waste and nonsense. Biggest projects don't even make it. There are fortune 500 companies that pay millions into projects that never get delivered, are delivered with lack of working aspects, or have their scope severely rolled back. But because this information is in private sector, it get's buried away from where the public, or especially the investors might see it.
Republicans not in charge of anything for years (Score:2)
The Republicans don't hold corporations accountable
Wake up man. Corporations have MORE of a hold over Democrats these days. There are some anti-corperation Republicans but there are NO anti-corp Democrats left.
Obamacare itself is a law designed to FORCE you to buy the most expensive insurance policy possible from "government chosen" private insurance companies. If that doesn't tell you all you need to know about the current relationship of corporations to government, you are to thinking.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Massachusetts spent three years rolling it's citizens into what I'll call "RomneyCare" - this President & his supporters implemented a similar law that applied to 49 other states and decided that the entire rollout would be over a handful of months.
Massachusetts didn't lard up the definition of "healthcare" to include every conceivable service, then jack up the copays and deductibles to get something that kinda-sorta looks like affordable coverage.
Massachusetts knew how to implement RomneyCare for less
Give it a rest (Score:3)
Yes, Heritage (a "think tank", NOT the GOP) published a paper endorsing an individual mandate on health insurance, but you guys on the left need to become a bit more honest about waving that report around as evidence that Republicans were for the concept of "Obamacare" up until "a black guy" was for it (always that nasty little accusation of racism, from the party (the Democrats) that owned all the slaves and went on to found the KKK). ONE report from ONE "conservative" think tank does NOT establish the bel
Re: (Score:2)
You are not forced to buy the most expensive plans
Why am I being forced to buy anything?
Furthermore, you are discounting all the people who are benefiting from the expansion of Medicaid in states that chose to allow the expansion.
Where do you think the money comes from for free stuff? The magic government bank account? Folks, the answer isn't more and more insurance. The desperate need is to lower the cost of sensible heath care. Decent health care is the "what". Insurance is simply a "how". One of many, probably the worst.
Surely all you developers out there have fought that battle. Trying to drag the actual "what do you need" instead of "Here's how to do it" from users wanting software.
The law also provides a solution to the pre-existing condition problem.
Defin
and THAT comment brought to you by (Score:2)
George Soros
I see your Libertarian boogeymen, and raise you one absolutely evil slimeball (do some research, and then weep)
And all that being said ... (Score:5, Insightful)
... I personally know several people, in several states that have not established their own exchanges, who have signed up for "Obamacare" using the federal site and are now taking advantage of much better coverage, at a much lower price, than they could have received before the ACA went into effect. The problems are real and clearly need to be fixed, but beware of confirmation bias--every single problem is going to get lots of press, while successes go unnoticed because they don't fit the "if it bleeds, it leads" paradigm.
Re:And all that being said ... (Score:5, Informative)
I agree, I also know people who have saved money. For them it worked out. Yay, them.
However, I was laid off and needed to use the system in December. Unemployment sucks, especially in the US. In early December I was told my application went through and I would get coverage, and was given a bunch of information that I printed. The second week of January (remember: I was in before the date when I was "guaranteed" to get coverage by Jan 1st) I was told there was an error in the site, all the information had been sent to the wrong place, asked to start the application process over. This is exactly what the original story complained about.
But that isn't all.
Saturday (this weekend) I got some snail mail that I was not covered, could not be covered through them, and told that there were numerous errors in my data. (For example, my wife was listed as a paid employee of my wife, a corporation based in my state, and was required to provide six months of pay stubs.) Today I spent most of the day on the phone with agents who could issue apologies but could not issue policies nor modify the data. They again instructed me to apply again (the third time).
Unfortunately I have some medical needs that cannot be put off, so I'm facing the horrible prospect of being a recently laid off tech worker who is being forced into medical debt while unemployed. (Currently only about $1,800 that would normally be covered by the insurance I lost with the layoff.) My little nest egg is vanishing surprisingly fast as I hunt for a job.
Just like the original story, I was advised to simply start the process over. Multiple times, including today.
As is frequently pointed out, the US medical billing system is badly broken.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You could have kept your employer plan through COBRA. Why did you not do it?
Due to a pre-existing condition, he couldn't bend over far enough.
Re: (Score:2)
Cobra is the extension of existing coverage, his "pre-existing condition" would not have been a factor - he would not have to apply for coverage, he would only need to start paying the full cost of his previous coverage.
Besides, denying anyone coverage because of a pre-existing condition is illegal, remember?
Re: (Score:3)
You could have kept your employer plan through COBRA. Why did you not do it?
Yes, for the low, low price of $2700 per month I could continue my insurance through COBRA.
The whole reason of going through the healthcare exchange was to find out about less costly alternatives. Like the $700 plan that the site recommended, and that I signed up for, and was guaranteed coverage for, and then was told the paperwork was lost due to government error, and to try again. And after the second attempt, to repeat the process.
So yes, I could have done that. And if the government's newfangled syste
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Better care? People, such as myself, who had to sign up under Obamacare only have a small fraction of the doctors available to them compared to everyone else using regular insurance. 15% of the doctors in my county now take my insurance, down from over 70% that took my PPO before this law came into effect. And I'm paying 40% more than I was before with three times the deductible.
Sure, I'm one person in a system of millions. But I'm one of the ones that got screwed and I know plenty of other people in the sa
Re: (Score:2)
> And I'm paying 40% more than I was before with three times the deductible.
That's interesting... that's almost exactly the numbers we saw. Wife and I both saw our company insurance dropped when Obamacare went into effect, and the replacement was a little bit more than 40% more expensive with almost exactly 3 times the deductible, for a much smaller pool of doctors. I'm told that the strategy is to live off your FSA for the first 3 - 4 months of a calendar year until your deductible gets paid up.
Appare
Re: (Score:2)
You responded to "not everyone had a bad experience" with "I had a bad experience", which was a given, and redundant.
Your further extrapolation was clearly buttressed by your anecdote, and therefore colored by it. Specifically, you feel wounded, and attribute things that have not happened yet and probably will not, to the program as you have experienced it, not to facts you could research.
I only respond so I can find this later as a textbook example of egocentric pessimism. The need to post your anecdote in
Re: (Score:3)
He's telling you exactly what he experienced in real life. Like him and the person he responded to, my wife and I also saw our coverage canned because of the ACA. To replace it, we must now pay roughly double the monthly premium, a hugely higher deductible, and have lost access to the doctor we've been using for 20 years. The best local hospitals are now off limits, too. But luckily, now that we're past child-bearing years, we've got free maternity care
Tel
Re: (Score:2)
Washington post has a great article with lots of anecdotes about people who've suffered and now have covererage.
The ACA is great if you make about ~$15k to ~$45k.
It's a wash above $45k to about $80k- and you need medicaid below $18k.
From $80k up- or if you have a very large family with lots of kids, it appears to be painful until you make so much money that $12,000 a year doesn't matter- I'd say around $350k. It's more a philosophical loss there.
However- everyone benefits from the preexisting condition cha
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
can get a gender change with insurance
Ok, I'm going to call you out as a troll.
This has been seriously pissing me the fuck off. Where the hell do I sign up for one of these free Obamacare sex changes?
Is the right just misinformed and free phalloplasty and testosterone HRT are available and they assumed that assigned males would also be given free vaginoplasty and estrogen HRT?
I don't know and don't care. Unless that's the case, you are completely full of shit. At the very least it doesn't excuse this rhetoric that Obamacare is so evil
Re: (Score:2)
She's 61 years old and now has the benefit of prenatal care/birth control and she can get a gender change with insurance should she decide to grow a dick. This whole thing is a catastrophe. The net result to the middle class (actually, anyone that is single earning over $47K) is getting to pay more than twice the premium for similar coverage.
Given that the oldest mother on record is 73 [wikipedia.org], she has a few years of 'possible' left. ;)
More seriously, part of Obamacare was getting rid of all sorts of weird carveouts. Consider that birth control and hormone replacement therapy are very similar. There are actually medical reasons to give a women male hormones other than transition- it's extremely rare, yes, but isn't that what insurance is for? If the adjusters are doing their job, they'll realize that the odds of your partner having another child rou
Re: (Score:2)
More than that too.
People with insurance were often billed a lot more ($1200 rack rate vs $75 insured negotiated rate) and then couldn't pay- and then tax payers and those with insurance had the $1200 slipped into their bills.
You sure the coverage is "Better", not just cheap? (Score:2)
From what I saw, coverage is cheaper but deductibles are WAY higher.
Re: (Score:2)
"Better coverage at lower rates"
Serious question, not a troll: How many of those policies are subsidized? From what I've heard, that's the way people wind up with a cost reduction.
- If they're not subsidized, then I hypothesize that the people should have shopped around - the policies were likely available.
- If they *are* subsidize, then we enter this discussion: Why should person A be able to pay their insurance using person B's wallet?
Mission Accomplished (Score:4)
Single-payer universal nationalized healthcare is right around the corner.
Just a few more insurance rate hikes and government regulatory fiascos should do the trick.
I used to be against it. Now it looks like a blessing.
How delusional can you get?!?!? (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's see here: massive, corrupt, inefficient and unaccountable bureaucracy fails to build and operate a website to manage ACCESS to health INSURANCE....not even ACTUAL HEALTHCARE......and YOUR solution is to say "let's put it in charge of providing the ACTUAL care"?????
REALLY?????
Can I please have the names of the drugs you are on? I'd love to see the utopia you are seeing, but I suspect those drugs kill IQ points, are highly addictive, lead to hallicinations and will eventually either be banned as "too da
The real problem is... (Score:4, Informative)
that the government keeps hiring firms like Accenture. This is not the first time they have been involved in failed government IT projects. Here is just one of many examples: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... [theregister.co.uk]
Accenture has learned how to game the system. A system that, for large scale government projects, is very difficult to break into. The contract language makes it very difficult, or impossible, to bid on if you are a small company.
Both the Democrats and the Republicans know that the procurement system is broken and yet neither one of them have offered any concrete solutions.
The failure of Healthcare.gov is not news. It's business as usual. The difference is that healthcare.gov affects many people more directly so it has higher visibility. Many of the other failed projects do not have the same direct impact so they appear in the news for a little while and are then swept under the rug.
Enron's Accenture? (Score:2)
Accenture -- weren't they the company that worked for Enron but in the aftermath of the fraud and the role they played in it they renamed the company to "Accenture." Or did they rename again and this company took the name? I am pretty sure Accenture was the name they picked after the Enron disaster.
Government flops that involve voters are a good thing; they can hold somebody accountable which is far more than they can do with businesses they are bound to.
Politicians are made or broken on how they handle
Re: (Score:2)
Accenture used to go by the name Andersen Consulting. Not sure if the name change had anything to do with what you mentioned above.
Re: (Score:2)
It does. Arthur andersen folded after Enron, and the bits that were left over got rebranded (since they did not want the stigma from the Enron fiasco attached to their name)
Ooh (Score:3)
we can fix it since it's open source! (Score:2)
"We’re making our source code freely available on GitHub" [healthcare.gov] and it's a promise they made good on... until the site launched. [theverge.com]
so... is it time to post the code again... or ever?
Can you say (Score:2)
Best to scrap the whole thing, law and all, and start over. And this time please don't leave it up to a community organizer and his gang.
Re: (Score:2)
It's always a great idea to question architectural plans once you bulldozed the entire neighborhood :-)
The problem is that old policies are dead and buried. Any new policy that is issued under the "old" system would cost twice as much, simply because (a) insurers lost a ton of money already on all those changes, and (b) it's a good time to raise the prices across the board (now that all insurers are in a similar position.)
The only winning move was to not play. Leave the sleeping dogs alone. A change in
Re: (Score:2)
clusterfuck?
Not so much. 22,000 is a goodly number of people, but it represents almost exactly 1% of people who have signed up so far. It's aggravating and stressful and certainly not a good thing, but it's also not the epic disaster that you seem to think it is. (And honestly, prior to the ACA, how many of those people would have been dealing with different but equally frustrating problems from their insurers anyway--and how many just wouldn't have access to health insurance at all?)
Re: (Score:2)
Those 22,000 people signed up for coverage to start in January, but if their coverage did start, it was wrong, the website messed it up, and they are either uninsured or insured but paying the wrong amount or getting the wrong coverage, and the government doesn't even seem to have a plan to review the 22,000 seven page appeal forms anytime soon.
Any idea when the appeals process will be implemented?
Any idea when their insurance policy will be corrected?
Private insurers had a motivation to correct these probl
Just the beginning (Score:2)
If the government can't put together a website, what in the world makes people think it can manage the complex healthcare system? The pain is only beginning. The failed amateur website will be nothing compared to the government crashing our healthcare system.
Re: (Score:2)
Wait till the other 95% of the healthcare plans in America become subject to the Employer mandate - the current fiasco only impacts the uninsured and 5% of those who arranged for their own coverage (the individual market)...
Glad I'm already covered through my company. (Score:2)
So I don't have to deal with this stupid bullshit.
How NOT to implement socialist^H^H^H^nationalized healthcare.
The real question is. . . (Score:2)
the smokers, obese, alcoholics and drug users don't have to change their ways, right? They can continue to choose lifestyles known to increase health risks while increasing the costs for the rest of us.
Apparently it's not an invasion of privacy or government overreach to force people to hand over their money to private companies or have the government forcibly extract the money from one's bank account whereas making people lead healthier lives is.
Re:Sad to see how the Republicans have killed this (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sad to see how the Republicans have killed this (Score:4, Informative)
And didn't 3 guys make a working front-end site in a few weeks (the part that lets you browse for coverage). This project went quite well if the goal was to funnel $600 MM into the pockets of well-connected contracting firms, but otherwise it's hard to see how anyone could fail so badly at what's effectively a storefront website. (Yes, the backend's a bitch, and 3 guys couldn't do it in a month, but it's not that hard).
Re:Sad to see how the Republicans have killed this (Score:4, Informative)
i'm pretty sure they got a decent version [healthsherpa.com] up and running in a long weekend...I actually used it to scan available plans in my state, the insurers involved, and to run what-if numbers quickly.
they did a real bang-up job.
Re: (Score:2)
> This project went quite well if the goal was to funnel $600 MM into the pockets of well-connected contracting firms
Sadly, I think that was the main purpose. And I believe it's the primary reason why government projects in general so often fail.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It didn't cost $634 million.
The $600+m is what you get if you simply add up every contract given to the original contractor (CGI Technology and Solutions) since 2007. You know, when Bush was in the Whitehouse. They're a reasonably large, reasonably well-used contractor for things so they do other stuff too.
Since Congress dicked around with actually providing specific funding for it's creation, the estimate is that it probably cost about $120 million, with an original budget of ~$55 million + auxiliary spend
Re:Sad to see how the Republicans have killed this (Score:4, Informative)
'The health department has provided some information on spending. It paid $174 million on contracts tied to Healthcare.gov and supporting technology through August, a sum that jumped to $319 million by the end of October, according to Albright of the Medicare agency.
The figures suggest a late surge in spending before the website’s opening. Only $18 million was spent in October, Albright said in an e-mail.
The Medicare and Medicaid agency owes $630 million for the work through September, Julie Bataille, a spokeswoman for the health office, has said. The agency didn’t provide updated information on the amount owed, or obligated, for work since the October debut of healthcare.gov.'
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/... [bloomberg.com]
Re: (Score:3)
That article isn't especially informative either, but does get into the issue better: it's all about how and what's being tracked and included as "healthcare.gov".
The $634m figure was being bandied around right out the gate - it's probably getting slightly closer to true now, but it depends on what you want to call a boondoggle in how you sum it up. I will wager there's a lot of non-optional IT costs at the moment which people are scrambling to shove under the "healthcare.gov" banner in order to hopefully m
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
$634 million is the amunt set aside for the website, they spent over half of that by Oct. 1, 2013, and are quickly burning through the rest trying to fix what they created.
Oregon sent over $150 million on their website [oregonlive.com], and last I heard hadn't been able to process a single application through it after 4 months! [freebeacon.com]
Re:Sad to see how the Republicans have killed this (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, $634 million and counting...
Nope. It is more like $174 million [snopes.com] and counting (still plenty of scratch though).
For those that don't follow the link (and are unfamiliar with government contracting practices - which is most everybody): CGI Federal was a successful bidder on an HHS umbrella contract in 2007 (Bush Administration, in other words) to provide IT services to HHS, along with IBM, Computer Sciences Corp., and Quality Software Services. These same four companies were the bidders (under said long term contract) for the specific task of site implementation, and the $634 million figure is for all of the services from CGI Federal under that contract. Only 25% of that total, dating back to 2007, was for the website.
Nice try (Score:4, Informative)
Obama Reid and Pelosi jammed this law through with absolutely NO Republican input (Republicans wer physically locked out of the rooms where the law was negotiated and written and heve never even been able to get the names of the lobbyists and lawyers and coproprations who were in the meetings with the Democrats, so they are under NO obligation to support it. That said, however, in every year since the GOP took back the House in 2010 they have had SYMBOLIC votes to repeal Obamacare (symbolic because Reid will never bring any such bill for even a VOTE in the senate (to protect his "moderates" from having to take a stand)) and then they have voted to give Obama all the funds to implement Obamacare (much to the outrage of the TEA Partiers).
Obamacare has been fully-funded; the GOP has failed to repeal it and failed to de-fund it... this is FACT
In those states where GOP governors have not driven their states further into debt by having their states implement state exchanges, those GOP governors are faithfully following Obama's law. If you think this is "wrong" or "unfair" or a form of "sabotage", do not blame any Republican... blame the Democrats who wrote the law with provisions that specifically enabled this choice of actions. The GOP is obeying the law that the Democrats wrote, Obama Reid and Pelosi are just incompetent.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
When did Democrats request more money to implement Obamacare and have that request denied by Republicans?
The implementation was fully funded by the 2010 PPACA law, there were no requests to increase funding for it's implementation, and the website went live the very first day of the government shutdown. Given all that, please point out how Republicans withheld funding for the implementation of ACA?
Sorry, previous post was right and YOU are wong (Score:3)
In October 2009 the Democrats who were then running congress by a huge majority changed the locks on the capitol hill meeting rooms [go.com] so they could keep Republicans out when they wanted to. (they did this to stop Republicans exposing the involvement of Democrats in the 2008 home loan meltdown activity at Countrywide, but they then used those locked rooms to exclude Republicans from the secret healthcare reform negotiations which Obama had promised would air in their entirety live on C-SPAN)
Obama did, indeed,
Re:No one should be surprised here: (Score:4, Funny)
Probably would have cost less money to just put up a web page that says; "We can't help you, but we will gladly take your money."
Not really, as the "take your money" part also doesn't work reliably.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Now tell us all how much you approve of the Patriot Act and Guantanamo.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I hate to feed a troll, considering how easy it is to unwind your political spin, but I just wanted to point out that we currently have death panels NOW. They are insurance companies, and the death toll they have amassed in documented neglect or denial of service absolutely dwarfs "thousands per year". There is abundant research on this; please do some.
Re: (Score:3)
At least right now you have the option of paying for it yourself. According to the GP, They can tell you "no, go away and die" if they do not approve it.... and you will not even be able to get it by paying out of your own wallet. Don't know if that's true or not.