"War Room" Notes Describe IT Chaos At Healthcare.gov 346
dcblogs writes "U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has released 175 pages of "War Room" notes — a collection of notes by federal officials dealing with the problems at Healthcare.gov. They start Oct. 1, the launch day. The War Room notes catalog IT problems — dashboards weren't showing data, servers didn't have the right production data, third party systems weren't connecting to verify data, a key contractor had trouble logging on, and there wasn't enough server capacity to handle the traffic, or enough people on the help desks to answer calls. To top it off, some personnel needed for the effort were furloughed because of the shutdown. Volunteers were needed to work weekends, but there were bureaucratic complications."
A better title for this post should have been... (Score:5, Insightful)
"War Room" Notes Describe IT Chaos At Healthcare.gov
"Third World characteristics describe War Room deliberations at Healthcare.gov."
After all, had this happened in some far away land, we'd be congratulating ourselves for "not being them", right? And how we, being the "first world", are better at implementation, with "checks" and "balances" at every step.
A strange game (Score:2)
The only winning move is not to play.
Lowest bidder wins... (Score:5, Insightful)
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But ends up costing multiple times more in the end.
Yes, as opposed to buying something like Oracle, where the highest bidder wins, and also ends up costing multiple times in the end.
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This is an honest question...If you Google "who bid on healthcare.gov" several seemingly right-leaning sites [teapartypatriots.org] say there was only one bid and it was won by Ms Obama's crony CGI.
Reuters [reuters.com] and others say there were 4 total bids, although I cannot find who those other 3 bidders are or what their bids were. And the end of that article states "No other IT contractors have come forward to say they, too, bid on the contract to build Healthcare.gov."
So honest question: which is i
Despite the failures of (Score:4, Insightful)
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You forgot how troops were sent into the Iraq war without body armor, and the families of soldiers had to take up collections of donations to buy body armor for their sons and daughters because the military wouldn't supply it to the troops. That's our federal government right there.
Security? (Score:3)
Underfunded (Score:5, Informative)
all wrong (Score:3)
Proper criticism (Score:3)
The thing is that things are now working the way they should be. That is were now criticizing the web site, the process, the contracts and learning lessons. This is how government is supposed to work. The republicans are going to town with criticizing the many faults of the website - which is perfectly fair and what they should have done to begin with. The Republicans never should have held the American public hostage to try and kill the ACA and they did tremendous damage to the economy by shutting down the government.
The Democrats meanwhile should be held accountable for an absolutely atrocious website and project that never would have passed even the most basic of reviews in the private world. The Republican criticisms of the website are pretty much well founded from what I have seen. If the Democrats had reached out to the private sector instead of designing the thing by political committee it could have been built to a much higher standard.
I'm not taking sides on this argument, what I am doing is saying that all government across the political spectrum should be held to this level of scrutiny and accountability. The long standing methods of bidding out government work have led to nothing but rampant fraud and inefficiencies that could never work anywhere except the federal government. Reform is needed, and if this website finally causes reform of government bidding and projects than it will have done more good than it ever meant too.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Lesson to all business side folks (Score:5, Insightful)
Standard War Room activities (Score:5, Informative)
I would be more concerned by the lack of a war room than from war room chaos.
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Add something meaningful. This wasn't because of Republicans. This entire fiasco is Government Bureaucracy screwing things up. It's that same kind of bureaucracy that just needs to go away. You can have regulations without bureaucracy.
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Re:Furloughed workers (Score:5, Insightful)
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So in other words you don't realize that as a healthy person you already subsidize the uninsured. Hospitals have to charge insured people so much in part because they have to cover the costs of all the people that have to treat who don't have insurance. So imagine if those people did have insurance! Of course you're going to have to help them pay for their insurance since the net affect is probably pretty minimal on a healthy person with insurance.
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Yet, under one method my health insurance is good and affordable. Under the other scenario my insurance costs 259% more and has higher deductibles and out of pocket costs.
The fact-checkers have been having a field day playing "gotcha" with the Fox News interviews with people claiming that their insurance will cost more under Obamacare. All they have to do is call the people up and ask them to describe their policy.
There were cheaper policies that didn't cover as much -- they had higher deductibles and out of pocket costs. People would find out, too late, that they had a $20,000 bill that their insurance didn't cover. Those policies won't qualify under Obamacare.
The Obamacare
Re:Furloughed workers (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure your SO feels the same way about your Viagra.
Re:Furloughed workers (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm so sorry that, at some point (Reagan,) we made the decision that humans should be taken care of, no matter what. We're not animals, after all. It's a dog-eat-dog world, but for %^@* sake, let's compete for wealth and such, not for basic survival. We mandated that hospitals treat any and all, and then they spread the costs around.
When we did so, and discovered that people in fact aren't all self-reliant future-predicting money-saving accident-preventing weather-controlling disease-resistant beings, and that we were having to cover costs at a later stage and greater expense than really necessary, yeah. We decided to push back a little, and ask people to contribute up-front to their statistically likely healthcare costs, for which we're all (one way or another) on the hook for.
This is, if anything, more of a personal-responsibility push than before, which I would have expected conservatives to favor. We have a safety net (you'll get healthcare no matter what) but by golly, we're tired of moochers. If you can pay, then pay. There are some things you can control about your health -- but there are an awful lot you can't, and for you to claim you know you won't need certain care is fairly ridiculous. Cancer? Car accident? Plague outbreak? You don't have enough data, nor enough of an immediate feedback loop, to plan properly for those eventualities. And unless you're willing to be left to rot and die on the side of the road, I don't accept your claim of self-reliance. It's all fine and good until bad shit happens.
Sure, your policy covers some gender-based services you clearly won't use, for the sake of simplicity, so we can compare plans and make informed decisions. The actual cost to you of having insurance coverage for services you know you won't need is really quite low, because it's spread across everyone, and you're getting benefits that others won't use. This isn't a savings plan, you're not paying into a silo, it's insurance. Same thing with paying taxes to pay, in general, for care for the poor. It's not a silo, it's an insurance plan for all citizens, even you, in the eventuality that your best-laid-plans fail and you wind up on the street.
You're not paying for services you won't need, you're paying to be part of an insurance pool with thousands of other people who will all have different issues, and you're all sharing the cost. It's different.
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working people realize how much they're going to have to spend to subsidize all the lower-income and non-workers.
you mean, like retired people, those who were laid off and due to outsourcing, can't find jobs?
how about those that have been going to emergency rooms for treatment since there was no other way for them?
we have always been supporting those that can't support themselves.
but I guess that, to you, its ONLY about those that 'refuse' to support themselves.
go ahead and tell me about 'bootstappiness'.
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"Tort Reform" is a red herring foisted by insurance companies. reducing the ability for patients to protect themselves when medical practitioners screw up does nothing to reduce costs and does everything to undercut the little guy.
healthcare costs so much in the U.S. because primary and preventative care are lacking, and the "market" has emphasized high-cost hospital care and pharmaceuticals [pbs.org]. in short, capitalistic greed is unchecked. sad, but unsurprising, really.
government is needed to step in and coun
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And for hundreds of millions of dollars (do you realize how many programmer hours that buys?!)
One, if you do it right.
Hey, if you can't beat 'em...
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The American people paid $88 million for what one can get done via CraigsList at about $50 an hour
1) post personal medical information to Craigslist
2) ???
3) Affordable health insurance!
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They are required to award contracts to the lowest qualified bidder. It's the qualification process that's the problem...
Re:Furloughed workers (Score:5, Insightful)
Add something meaningful.
Go-live fiascos like this are quite common in the private sector. Large corporate bureaucracies can be just as bad, if not worse, than government. The difference is that this particular SNAFU is getting dissected in the press. It's a great opportunity to learn about the complexities involved when deploying large, complex, federated systems. I guarantee you there are people in the private sector pushing these articles to their corp. IT as a way to shame CIOs and CEOs into cutting the red tape, procurement hurdles, fiefdoms, and archaic development methodologies in their own organizations. If you want something meaningful from this event, learn from it rather than pointing fingers at "The Government." These are problems in most large organizations.
Re:Furloughed workers (Score:4, Insightful)
Add something meaningful.
Go-live fiascos like this are quite common in the private sector. Large corporate bureaucracies can be just as bad, if not worse, than government. The difference is that this particular SNAFU is getting dissected in the press. It's a great opportunity to learn about the complexities involved when deploying large, complex, federated systems. I guarantee you there are people in the private sector pushing these articles to their corp. IT as a way to shame CIOs and CEOs into cutting the red tape, procurement hurdles, fiefdoms, and archaic development methodologies in their own organizations. If you want something meaningful from this event, learn from it rather than pointing fingers at "The Government." These are problems in most large organizations.
This times a million. How many Oracle rollouts went disastrously wrong in private industry that it was obvious even to the casual observer (despite corporate NDAs) and yet here we have a bigger project than most, that was actually live on the date that it was supposed to be (despite capacity issues and some lingering bugs) but of course the fact that it wasn't perfect is proof that the government can't do anything right. If this same project were corporate, it would have gone live in 2015, still had only half the features it was supposed to, and bonuses would still be rained upon the CEO/CIO's heads. There's your "free market efficiency".
Re:Furloughed workers (Score:4, Insightful)
Although these problems are bound to occur in any large organization, their impact is disproportionately large when a monopolist power screws up. In areas where there is competition, people at least have alternatives (even if they aren't ideal). When Apple launched a broken maps app, people used Google maps on safari until Google released their own app. Windows 8 sucks? Buy a Mac, an iPad, or Galaxy Tab. But for a federal government fail, the alternative is to, what, move to Canada?
But both conservatives and liberals can take away valid arguments from this; liberals can say that in order to get government to do all the things that we (for certain definitions of "we") want then we have to be willing to spend the money to do it right, and conservatives can say that having the government run (for certain definitions of "run") something creates a single point of failure and should therefore be avoided.
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In a competitive race to the bottom, all alternatives are equally unacceptable. Competition alone can not and will not magically make things better or even make them tolerable. There is little difference between a monopolists poor service and the poor services of an entire industry.
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Go-live fiascos like this are quite common in the private sector.
What are you talking about? Every EA game launch has gone absolutely perfectly. They never have any problems on launch day.
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Some are quite spectacular - go back a few years and see Apple's iPhone 3G launch where the vast majority of purchases could not use their phones because Apple's activation servers melted down from the immense load. (And it's not like Apple doesn't have the numbers of how many iPhone 3Gs they made...).
Or it seems any big video game launch because the DRM servers melted down...
Re:Furloughed workers (Score:4, Interesting)
So ... I repeat my wife's question: do you REALLY want these people in charge of your healthcare? I don't.
Isn't it an opt-in system? So don't opt-in. I thought the point was that there are a lot of people who can't afford any healthcare. Those are the people that Obamacare is aimed at. Slightly chaotic healthcare is better than no healthcare.
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Do you mean taxes, or potential lack of health care?
Having to pay more taxes is a fair enough point I suppose, though I consider it quite a selfish one. If your government cut back to less than a trillion dollars of military spending per year (that might sound like an exaggerated joke number, but it's not..) then you could potentially have lower taxes as well as nice things like national healthcare. Maybe you consider that military spending an investment in the future of the oil market, I don't know..
If the
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If your government cut back to less than a trillion dollars of military spending per year (that might sound like an exaggerated joke number, but it's not..) then you could potentially have lower taxes as well as nice things like national healthcare
100x this.
we have overspent on 'guns and tanks and shit' at the expense of our own local welfare and well-being.
there are those of us who see this; but those who see it are never the ones who control the spending ;(
remove the military. almost entirely! and see w
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I did do a Google search, and this [wikipedia.org] is what I was found.
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I've only read about 5% of the way into that article and it's actually terrifying. Because he's right. He says what a lot of Slashdotters hint at, but he says it very clearly..
Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election?
It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.
I don't give a shit about republicans vs democrats, because both parties are obviously corrupt, and both are happy to continue infringing on their citizens' privacy, and continue their invasions of the rest of the world..
Fuck that. Really, fuck it. I used to be angry at America, but now I just feel bad for its citizens - a lot of whom
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Where in the world did yo get the information that the system is "slightly chaotic"?
If you'd read the post I was replying to, you might have understood the context of that statement. He was saying that the system (once it is working) would end up similar to that of the Social Security department - that the system would work overall, but occasionally people would screw up because they're not paying attention.
Re:Furloughed workers (Score:5, Insightful)
do you REALLY want these people in charge of your healthcare? I don't.
Congrats you baited me. The Government is not in charge of your healthcare any more than the SEC is in charge of your stock portfolio. ACA created a regulated market for private insurance. The person deciding whether or not you get surgery is a medical director at a *private* insurance company. Not a government official. If anything, ACA made it harder for insurance companies to deny coverage for certain types of care. This Republican talking point is way over-played and not based on facts.
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The Government is not in charge of your healthcare any more than the SEC is in charge of your stock portfolio.
Oh really? So, the SEC will fine me for not being invested in a minimum government approved set of funds, that I may or may not need? Will the SEC shut down funds that are not diversified in the manner in which the government has determined must be put in place in order to further finance other investors that don't have as much to invest?
ACA created a regulated market for private insurance
All private insurance was already heavily regulated! All the ACA did was create thousands of new government jobs and rake in half a billion dollars in new lobbying by th
Personal responsibility (Score:5, Insightful)
So, the SEC will fine me for not being invested in a minimum government approved set of funds,
OMG, you have to pay a fine for not being insured!!! I guess that fine will go towards the actuarial cost you are incurring to society for just existing, and expecting not to die on the side of the street if you fall over an break your leg.
So which is it? Should the government scrap you off the side of the road in case misfortune visits you. If so, should someone else pay, or should you? If you can't afford to pay, shouldn't you be forced to insurance yourself.
What's that zen mantra of conservationism again? "Personal responsibility". Only an ideologue can look at a black wall and say it is white.
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So which is it? Should the government scrap you off the side of the road in case misfortune visits you. If so, should someone else pay, or should you? If you can't afford to pay, shouldn't you be forced to insurance yourself.
If the issue was actually insurance like we issue for cars, then the costs would be trivial. There are really good reasons why this stuff is so expensive. Unfortunately, as we're now finding out, if a company isn't providing everything from birth control to chronic disease care as a complete package then that policy is no longer valid per the ACA. This is why 3.5 million folks who had policies that worked for them no longer do.
And yes, if you break your leg on the side of the street then you should accep
Re:Personal responsibility (Score:4, Insightful)
If the issue was actually insurance like we issue for cars, then the costs would be trivial. There are really good reasons why this stuff is so expensive.
I think I'll trust an actuary to calculate the actual cost. Put in a reasonable mark-up, and you have: insurance. If the market is, well, efficient, then the mark-up will be reasonable. So let's apply those good-old liberal ideas [wikipedia.org] of free markets, and let the magic happen.
Otherwise, the bill should be in the mail.
And if you can't pay, and declare bankruptcy? Who pays then? You pretending this isn't a problem [cnbc.com]?
There were issues that could have been addressed by our government that could have actually helped.
Right, like an almost-single-payer system, like what works in most of the OECD. Instead, in an attempt to [archive.org] compromise [reuters.com], we get a regulated insurance market and a mandate [politifact.com], just like leading conservatives supported up until 2008 [motherjones.com].
What happened in 2008? Obama was elected, adopted the GOP healthcare plan, and was promptly labelled a tyrant by an apocalyptic cult [truth-out.org]. Just the opinion of a 20+ year GOP insider who knows a hell of a lot more about what happens on the hill than you do.
Now we know the president either lied outright about what would happen to existing policies
You _can_ keep your policy if you like it, so long as you've had the policy since before the ACA was passed. The fact that insurance companies are changing the policies and then trying to up-sell clients onto more expensive planes: who would have thunk it, that businesses would act this way. I agree that Obama shouldn't have used the language he did, because it is too easy to pick apart. But it is hardly the lie you WANT it to be.
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The difference is that you may not need funds, but you WILL need healthcare. You will, you just never know when. It's inevitable, unless you're somehow immortal.
Re:Furloughed workers (Score:5, Insightful)
but you WILL need healthcare
Yes. And I will need food and water, as well as shelter and clothing. In fact, those things are a far higher priority in my day to day survival than health care.
Is it now the job of the government to provide all things deemed essential?
Re:Furloughed workers (Score:4, Informative)
And it just might be even more complicated than both of you think. Yes, the insurance company is a private corporation, but it is following book loads of rules promulgated by the Federal Government. Yes, for all practical purposes, the Government is in charge of your healthcare.
Yes, the ACA made it harder for the insurance companies to do some things, like drop you for pre existing conditions, but the insurance companies recieved lots of carrots for that particular stick. The big failing of the ACA, IMHO, is that it did not come down hard enough on the insurance companies - they are the big winners in all of this.
Re:Furloughed workers (Score:5, Insightful)
Does your wife really think that insurance companies don't make errors with billing, coding or paying the bills?
Next time you're in your doctor's office, ask them how much effort it is to work with the various insurance companies. Should you be in a hospital, ask the doctor how much time is lost in disputing the necessity of treatment with insurance companies, or how many patients opt for less than optimal treatment because an insurance company bureaucrat interprets a rule differently from other staff at the very same firm.
Re:Furloughed workers (Score:4, Insightful)
Does your wife really think that insurance companies don't make errors with billing, coding or paying the bills?
Next time you're in your doctor's office, ask them how much effort it is to work with the various insurance companies.
Ask them which is worse - the insurance companies or Medicare?
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Correct. It's mostly Medicaid.
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My son turned 1 year old 2 weeks ago. We're STILL dealing with incorrect billing issues from his birth.
Re:Furloughed workers (Score:5, Informative)
Happened to me.
In 1981 I received SSI benefits because my father was disabled.
In 2012 I received a letter from the Social Security Administration saying they had overpaid me in 1981 and I owed them money.
After over 30 years!
I sent letter after letter, with the appropriate appeal form. They ignored all of them.
Just kept sending increasingly threatening letters. By the way, they were sending the letters to an address I ahve not lived at for over 30 years. Even though they have my current address.
I called, they could not help. Eventually someone was able to change the address.
They then sent a wage garnishment to my employer.
I called, reached a person who said 'fine, we'll reverse this'. But they didn't actually tell anyone.
So my employer deducted it from my wages. How embarrassing is that? They said I had to work it out with SSA.
And after that, the IRS deducted it from my tax refund. They too said I had to work it out with SSA.
Then I get a letter from the SSA saying 'we have recalculated your benefits and we owe you money'.
They sent me a check for over double what the had garnished from me.
No doubt i will get another letter in the future telling me I owe them money
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Actually you will get police at your door arresting you for fraud, how dare you cash that check they send you.
Re:Furloughed workers (Score:5, Insightful)
So ... I repeat my wife's question: do you REALLY want these people in charge of your healthcare? I don't.
They're not in charge of your healthcare. They're in charge of making sure you get healthcare from a qualified insurance company and have the ability to discuss your medical needs with a qualified doctor.
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"put it to you this way: you've seen how things work here. Do you really want the same people deciding whether or not your mother can have surgery?"
Oh if only everything was a simple as the private sector!
"Have they paid us lots of money in the past? Can they afford to give us a lot of money now? No? No surgery for mother then. Next case!"
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Like Nataline Sarkisyan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Nataline_Sarkisyan [wikipedia.org]
Michael Moore wouldn't be able to make those movies if the insurance companies didn't make it so easy for him.
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(cough) the website guys are NOT 'in charge of your healthcare'.
go back to watching faux news and stop commenting on stuff you have no idea about.
previous system: insurance companies decided if you lived or died. how could that EVER be better than what is currently being implemented?
but anyway, a website is not a doctor. nice distraction attempt, though.
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Of course they are. But they're worse in the government, because a business, at least, has to eventually show a profit. A government can simply print more money or borrow to cover the shortfall.
Another AC making as if they are an authority on how government work actually gets done. Like you know from experience, and didn't just dream this nonsense up in the cellar of your imagination. Economists do try and understand these issues, and the actual amount of waste in government would surprise anyone who buys into the four-legs-good, government-bad narrative. Of course, those economists are just liberal elitists, and O'Reilly has better ratings anyway.
Once upon a time, conservatives actually had id
Re:Furloughed workers (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't have a problem with someone posting a small comment as an AC to preserve modding in general articles.
But I will agree that the AC had a long post with "insider knowledge" that is beyond appropriate.
If you have detailed knowledge of a story, choose to either mod or comment.
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Simple solution: Just say, "My username is _____, I'm just posting as AC to preserve mod points."
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Who the fuck cares?
Mod points aren't actual things.
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... while also seizing control of 1/6 of its economy.
If health insurance is 1/6 of the United States' economy, I think we might have bigger problems.
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Add something meaningful. This wasn't because of Republicans. This entire fiasco is Government Bureaucracy screwing things up. It's that same kind of bureaucracy that just needs to go away. You can have regulations without bureaucracy.
From the church of libertarianism: the all-powerful all-wasteful government. I'm sure you never were part of an audit of a government to work out how much waste/cruft there is, and compared the results to, say, a fortune 500. Nah... you just *know* your right.
I'm slightly libertarian myself, but as a true conservative, I respect the fact that I don't know enough about society to architect a solution, and thus favour incremental change. Getting "buraeucracy to go away", as you put it, is the type of arrog
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You guys are so funny. If a Republican gets into office, and wants to expand government programs because he's a "compassionate conservative", you slam him for spending too much money. Afterall, conservatives can't bash big spending Democrats when "Republicans do it too".
So now a faction of the Republican party gains a few seats, and you bash them for being the example of small-government, budget-conscience conservatives you keep claiming you are looking for in a "loyal opposition party".
So, what is the tru
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Wait, what "compassionate conservatism" have you seen bashed on this site? Not calling you out here, I just really can't think of a politician pushing compassionate conservatism since Obama got elected, and certainly not on a platform loud enough to have been discussed on /.
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Do you want Republicans that spend like liberal Democrats,
If you go by history, democrats know how to balance the budget and bring deficits down. Conservatives have their own "economics" that says that tax cuts are free, and then are disconnected from their largess anyway, so the budget gets fscked up.
The problem with the tea party isn't that they want small government, but that they want to cut the parts of the government they don't want, which don't cost much anyway. The three biggest chunks of government are: military, social security, and medicare. Most of
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Yes, I agree. Look at my sig below for an idea of what I would rather have at this point.
But that isn't the point of criticizing Republicans who want to limit the federal government.
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To be fair, healthcare.gov was clearly behind schedule and they released what they had. I don't think the government shutdown caused the problem. It may have made it worse because they had a few less people working on it.
Server capacity issues mean they didn't perform load testing or underestimated demand. Of course, the code wasn't done so it's hard to test.
A small team could have written that website in the time allotted without issues provided the specs didn't change. The cost of the site and the numbe
Re:Furloughed workers (Score:5, Insightful)
healthcare.gov was opened to the public Oct 1st, the gov't shutdown started Oct 1st... anyone blaming furloughs for its problems is being disingenuous at best... and the gov't had 3 YEARS to get the site up and running
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It takes two to tango, and the Democrats were saying no to Republican proposals with equal vigor.
The childlike games played just to prevent spending cuts is embarrassing and shameful.
you are full of it, stop (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean the party that kept sending bills to the senate while the Dems said only "NO, NO, NO! We'd rather have a mandated shutdown!"?
You mean
That party you mean???
This is not to say the Dems are blameless, but for fuck's sake, stop saying the GOP is the party that keeps sending bills to the senate. That's fucking bullshit, and you know it.
Truly yours, a life-long Republican tired of seeing a sea of stupid beasts more interested in destruction, confederate-flag waving, secession, creationism, birtherism, social-medieval conservatism-barbarism and just blatant mental anachronisms than on making things work with the other half of the population who does not agree with everything they say...
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This was a very interesting debate on this very issue:
http://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/past-debates/item/801-the-gop-must-seize-the-center-or-die [intelligen...aredus.org]
The classical concept of the Republican platform has broad appeal. It's why I had registered as a Republican all those years ago, but my registration doesn't guarantee my vote, the GOP doesn't offer many opportunities to vote for those kinds of ideals anymore. The GOP needs to find those ideals again to recover the popular vote, but it looks like things are
Re:you are full of it, stop (Score:4, Informative)
bills meant to defund or stop the implementation of something that is already a law?
Well, yeah. That's the exact job of the House of Reps. Please refer to the constitution for any further guidance on this matter.
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Re:Furloughed workers (Score:5, Insightful)
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When someone begins a statement with "All I know is..." I consider it within my rights to interpret it literally.
Re:Furloughed workers (Score:5, Informative)
You mean the party that kept sending bills to the senate ...
...without making any attempt whatsoever to make those bills something that could pass in said senate?
Yeah, them.
Note that the Senate during this time also sent a bill to the house. By all accounts, it was a bill that would have passed in the house with flying colors, and the POTUS would have signed. It would also have represented a tremendous victory for Republicans, cutting food stamps by 4 billion dollars, and all sorts of other assorted (IHMO evil) cuts to the poor that Republicans were wanting. In the Bush era a Republican house would have jumped right on this.
The house's Republican leadership wouldn't bring it up for a vote. In fact, they changed their own rules specifically to prevent anyone from being able to bring this passable bill up on the House floor. Why not take a big legislative victory? Because the Republicans in the House don't care about legislative victories. They wanted to shut the government down. Simple as that.
Re:Furloughed workers (Score:4, Insightful)
"The government employs too many people. We borrow money from China to employ them."
In the 1990s you didn't. You simply had a high enough tax rate to cover the bills and run a bit of a surplus that could be used to pay down the accumulated debt. Then the tax rate was cut on the theory that this would stimulate the entire economy. Instead it seems to have spectacularly enhanced incomes at the upper end. Although an unpopular solution, letting those tax cuts expire is one way to solve the budget problem.
The deficit problem you describe exists largely because the political decision was made to take in less revenue and spend more on programs, because "deficits don't matter", in the hopes that starving government of funds will eventually lead to lower costs, somehow. Unfortunately the people making these decisions have the will to cut revenue, but apparently not the corresponding expenses. The results are predictable. It is an artificial crisis that has been created by doing one thing and not doing the complement to it. The solution is to follow through with cuts that should have been made a decade ago or to reverse the revenue decline.
I agree that the government employs too many people for current revenue, but if you actually want to make cuts that matter, you should be looking at big-ticket government employment, such as spending more than any other country in the world on the military. Sad as it is, these federal employees and the gear they use are pretty expensive too. Perhaps fewer aircraft carriers would be worthwhile to consider, for example.
Re:Furloughed workers (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with your analysis is that you have the facts wrong [comeletusr...gether.com].
If you look at a chart of revenue and spending [comeletusr...gether.com] in constant dollars, you'll see that after the 1998 tax cuts, revenue increased until the dot.com bust in 2000. Revenue was down until the 2001 & 2003 Bush tax cuts, after which it increased until the housing bubble burst in 2007/08. Tha major tax cuts in the era you're talking about weren't followed by revenue decreases in the years right after they took effect. Revenue right now is about average for the last 15 years, down a bit because it follows the state of the economy and the economy overall is still down. Minor changes in tax rates don't affect revenue that much. Annual revenue is UP about a trillion dollars since 1980, so it's not like we've suddenly had less revenue than ever before.
Spending is the the obvious issue. Since 1980, spending is up $1.8 Trillion (still constant, i.e. inflation adjusted dollars). Since 2000, it's up over a Trillion dollars.
Bottom line, revenue is way up. Spending is just way, way more up. Revenue has gone in the desired direction. The issue is that Spending has gone in the wrong direction if we want to solve anything related to debt and deficits.
Re:Furloughed workers (Score:5, Insightful)
Please try again. This time plot revenue and spending as a percentage of GDP. I'll save you some time, go here [businessinsider.com] to see it.
You are correct that spending is up, even as a percentage of GDP. The budget should be reviewed, as some of the causes are cyclical (the recession) and will "self solve" as the economy improves, while others are structural issues, like devoting an ever larger chunk of the budget to military and war expenditures over the past decade.
But it's just as important to realize that as a percentage of GDP revenue is down. Those tax cuts mean the government is taking in a smaller percentage of economic output. So when inflation drives up the cost of guns/tanks/healthcare/office space/contractors for the government there isn't a corresponding increase in revenue to off set it, because we've chosen to end taxes on a number of things that get inflated (like the wealthiest 1%'s salaries).
Your bottom line is wrong. Revenue is up in dollar amount, but down as a percentage of the economy. Spending is up by both measures. Revenue has not kept pace with economic growth. To solve the debt and deficits we must both lower spending and raise tax revenue, ideally by closing loopholes and credits, rather than raising the marginal rates.
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But it's just as important to realize that as a percentage of GDP revenue is down. Those tax cuts mean the government is taking in a smaller percentage of economic output.
Yes, reduction of revenue per point of GDP is what a tax cut is. Congratulations on discovering a tautology. What matters is whether GDP would be high enough with or without taxes (de)incentivizing growth to make the absolute value of revenue higher or lower. You don't spend "money in relation to GDP", you spend "money".
Re:Furloughed workers (Score:4, Informative)
Translation: The government cut taxes and relied on the capital gains windfalls from speculative bubbles to fund itself. This went about as well as you would expect.
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Yeah...they'd rather just be moderating trolls.
Re:Furloughed workers (Score:5, Informative)
As a former DoD software developer, let's review your comments.
According to the best source of info I could easily find [answers.com], federal salaries made up just 13.8% of the federal budget as of 2005.
You also neglect some important questions:
Expensive compared to what? If they don't have to show a profit, etc., then can you objectively demonstrate that they're getting less done than a (potentially) lower-priced contractor?
Also, you fail to mention that there's a very open debate about if / when contractors are a better deal for the government than are civil servants. Partisan thinktanks have no problem making sweeping statements, but organizations specifically charged with reporting truthfully find that there's not enough data.
I hope you're also not going to compare the average salary of all public sector works vs. all private sector workers. Because for the most part, the government doesn't hire people to do low-skilled work. For example, at the military sites that I've been at, things like building cleaning, etc. was mostly done by private contractors.
As opposed to what contractors do? Good grief man, have you ever seen what private sector contractors do? I've seen plenty of silliness and inefficiency in civil servants, but I've seen countless times contractors milking / drawing out contracts, while often getting less done than the civil servants with whom they collaborate.
I suspect you have two basic problems. (1) You're so frustrated with the negative examples you've seen of civil servants, that you simply assume the private sector is more efficient. And (2), you're confusing your complaints regarding the breadth and intrusiveness of the government's self-granted scope, with the quality of work being done by civil servants.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Did you actually read the CBO document? I have read it and it says the exact opposite of what you believe it to say. As an example, you said:
...Because for the most part, the government doesn't hire people to do low-skilled work. For example, at the military sites that I've been at, things like building cleaning, etc. was mostly done by private contractors.
The CBOs data suggests you are just flat out wrong concerning this statement.
The CBO report says, and I quote: "Both high and low wages tend to be less prevalent in the federal government than in the private sector, so the range between those wages—the dispersion of wages— tends to be narrower for federal employees." The report that you reference also states that employees with less than a high school diploma are overpaid compar
Re: (Score:2)
I'm aware of that study, and of others, I believe including at least one from the OPM.
Also, the offsets you mentioned support my primary point, which is that it's not necessarily true that every job is more cheaply done by the private sector.
Re:Furloughed workers (Score:4, Interesting)
The US Government can simply take more money from taxpayers, then borrow 40 cents from China for every dollar, and they will make ACA succeed by brute-force.
Uh, isn't that basically just socialism, plus the fact that people want more than what they can afford? They could just spend less on healthcare and get the same result without the borrowing. However, the whole point of socialism is to take money from people who have money and to spend it on people who don't. If you don't like that then the solution is to just let people who can't afford insurance die, which most would not consider an acceptable solution.
The problem with healthcare is that everybody wants to paint it like some black-and-white simple problem with a simple solution, when in reality it is about 500 problems lumped into one big mess. There are lots of issues that drive up costs. There are lots of issues that discourage preventative care. There are lots of issues with who gets cared for. There are lots of administrative issues with paying a fair price for the work that gets done. There are lots of issues with trying to figure out what the best way to take care of a sick person actually is.
Everybody like to just pick one thing and point out a simple solution to it. Just let ERs turn away the indigent and now hospitals are solvent (just be sure to budget more money for the morgue, both for those who can't afford care and also for those who left their wallets at home when they keeled over). Just set the reimbursement rate for a particular treatment at $10 and now it doesn't cost much to pay for it (ignore the fact that nobody will provide the treatment any longer). Let the market freely set prices (and ignore the fact that consumers have little ability to shop around while unconscious). Every complicated problem has a simple solution that won't work...
Re: (Score:2)
"aliens' aliens" ... is us, right?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That'll come as a shock to many Americans who think the globe is divided into 'America' and 'Them'.
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Dunno but good comeback. Win.
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This roll out is a great example of why meaningful oversight (and competent competition) is necessary in the government. If Issa had been doing this 6 months ago, the healthcare website may have worked. You don't need to like him, but in this case, putting the screws to contractors and government personnel is the right thing to do.
Re: (Score:2)
Strawman and misdirection: OP said nothing about the Redskins; your point must be a poor one if you've got to lie about what the grandparent said.