AnotherNils
Member
You shouldn't feel for Boehner in public.Am I allowed to feel bad for Boehner?
You shouldn't feel for Boehner in public.Am I allowed to feel bad for Boehner?
Am I allowed to feel bad for Boehner?
He allowed thousands of Americans to be furloughed and put unnecessary burden on millions more. All because he wanted to keep his job.Am I allowed to feel bad for Boehner?
My parents have always been very liberal (my father is a non-voter because American politics isn't left-wing enough for his standards. Mom is a lifelong Democrat who campaigned for McGovern), and yes, they are from California.
The rest of my father's family are a smorgasbord of arch-conservatives. One of my uncles and his family actually moved to Dallas a few years back in order to be closer to George W. Bush.
We don't speak to them often.
Insurers say the federal health-care marketplace is generating flawed data that is straining their ability to handle even the trickle of enrollees who have gotten through so far, in a sign that technological problems extend further than the website traffic and software issues already identified.
Emerging errors include duplicate enrollments, spouses reported as children, missing data fields and suspect eligibility determinations, say executives at more than a dozen health plans. Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Nebraska said it had to hire temporary workers to contact new customers directly to resolve inaccuracies in submissions. Medical Mutual of Ohio said one customer had successfully signed up for three of its plans.
The flaws could do lasting damage to the law if customers are deterred from signing up or mistakenly believe they have obtained coverage.
"The longer this takes to resolve the harder it will be to get people to [come back and] sign up," said Aetna Inc. AET -0.56% Chief Executive Mark Bertolini. "It's not off to a great start," he said, though he believes the marketplaces are "here to stay."
Of 209,000 users who began to register on healthcare.gov on Monday or Tuesday of this week, just over one-quarter finished the process, according to an estimate made by the analytics firm comScore for The Wall Street Journal. In the first week, only 10% did so. The estimates are based on a sampling of Internet users tracked by the company.
As more of those users attempted to sign up for plans this week, insurers began noticing problems with enrollment data. For now, they say they are largely able to manually correct the errors. But as enrollment increasesup to 7 million consumers are expected to sign up in the next 5½ monthsthat may not be possible, they worry.
Scott & White Health Plan in Temple, Texas, has received 25 enrollees from the federally run exchange so far. "There are some missing data elements that are requiring a lot of research on our part," said Allan Einboden, the health plan's chief executive. "If we'd received 5,000 and they all had to be worked, that's a lot of extra administrative costs," said Mr. Einboden, who said he expects the problems to be fixed.
After realizing that some applications listed up to three spouses in a single family, Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Nebraska, which has about 50 health-law enrollees, had to "stop those enrollments from going through the automated process," said Matt Leonard, the insurer's sales manager. "It takes an automated process and turns it into a manual process," he said.
What has happened, at least so far, presents itself in several layers. One key problem, which to date has been the most prominent in public, has to do with a late-in-the-game decision to require users to go through a complex account-creation process before even reaching any coverage options. Administration officials apparently went back and forth several times on this question, and the ultimate decision required the creation of a series of patches over an already developed site in a very short time. Most of the problems people have faced so far are a function of that decision, and have had to do with creating user accounts and so getting through the very first steps involved in purchasing coverage. Some journalists and analysts have speculated that this decision was made in order to prevent people from seeing premium costs before they could also see any subsidies they might be eligible for, so that the shock of higher prices could be contained and so that simply curious observers and journalists couldnt get a picture of premium costs in the various states. This explanation strikes me as plausible, and it struck several of the people I spoke with as plausible, but none of them could confirm it. It may be true, but its surely not the only possible explanation. Whatever the cause, that decision has created crippling problems that are still largely unresolved.
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Meanwhile, the back-end communication between the exchanges and the insurers has been terrible, as is increasingly being reported. The extent of these problems has also been a surprise to CMS, and here too an increase in volume if the user interface issues are solved could lead to huge problems that would be very difficult to correct. CMS officials and the large insurers thought at first that the garbled data being automatically sent to insurers must be a function of some very simple problems of format incompatibility between the government and insurer systems, but that now seems not to be the case, and the problem appears to be deeper and harder to resolve. It is a very high priority problem, because the system will not be able to function if the insurers cannot have some confidence about the data they receive. At this point, insurers are trying to work through the data manually, because the volume of enrollments is very, very low. But again, if that changes, this could quickly become impossible.
The tone of the CMS officials who spoke with me was a kind of restrained panic. Among the insurance company officials (who, I should stress again, work in the Washington offices of some large insurers, and so are basically policy people and lobbyists), there was much less restraint. The insurers are very, very worried about the viability of the exchange systemespecially but not exclusively at the federal level.
One key worry is based on the fact that what theyre facing is not a situation where it is impossible to buy coverage but one where it is possible but very difficult to buy coverage. Thats much worse from their point of view, because it means that only highly motivated consumers are getting coverage. People who are highly motivated to get coverage in a community-rated insurance system are very likely to be in bad health. The healthy young man who sees an ad for his state exchange during a baseball game and loads up the site to get coveragethe dream consumer so essential to the design of the exchange systemwill not keep trying 25 times over a week if the site is not working. The person with high health costs and no insurance will. The exchange system is designed to enable that sick person to get coverage, of course, but it can only do that if the healthy person does too. The insurers dont yet have a clear overall sense of the risk profile of the people who are signing up, but the circumstantial evidence they have is very distressing to them. The danger of a rapid adverse selection spiral is much more serious than they believed possible this summer.
Does anyone here actually have liberal leaning parents? it seems no one has ever mentioned this?
Does anyone here actually have liberal leaning parents? it seems no one has ever mentioned this?
My dad is certainly not conservative but also not liberal. He's as middle of the road as you get. He's also been shaped by a lot that I tell him these days (he often asks me to explain things, in say economic terms). My mom almost doesn't have political opinions.
But most of the 2nd generation friends i have in Cali have liberal parents because, well, it's California.
Can't tell if poli-gaf parents are all conservative or the ones that have non-conservative parents just don't ever mention it.
This is really bad. They need to fix this within the next couple weeks. If they can't this is going to doom the exchanges.Some dispiriting reports regarding the rollout of the ACA, courtesy of the WSJ and NR.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304410204579142141827109638
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/361577/assessing-exchanges-yuval-levin
the TL;DR version: fed exchanges are an unmitigated disaster, CMS officials recoiling in disbelief at back end problems affecting both federal and state exchanges, data is not being synchronized between various servers causing headaches for insurers, and a growing concern about the potential for adverse selection spiral.
YesDoes anyone here actually have liberal leaning parents? it seems no one has ever mentioned this?
My dad is certainly not conservative but also not liberal. He's as middle of the road as you get. He's also been shaped by a lot that I tell him these days (he often asks me to explain things, in say economic terms). My mom almost doesn't have political opinions.
But most of the 2nd generation friends i have in Cali have liberal parents because, well, it's California.
Can't tell if poli-gaf parents are all conservative or the ones that have non-conservative parents just don't ever mention it.
They did trial it, however at the last second they decided to not reveal premium prices until after signing up, even though it was thoroughly tested to do the opposite (show prices beforehand). Apparently this was to prevent "sticker shock" but frankly if they were that late in the game they had to know they'd be taking a huge risk and should have just stomached the whole "sticker shock" fear.Didn't they trial the software?
In the UK changes to benefits are tested in smaller areas before going national. And things still go wrong, but at least the bigger problems are ironed out.
They did trial it, however at the last second they decided to not reveal premium prices until after signing up, even though it was thoroughly tested to do the opposite (show prices beforehand). Apparently this was to prevent "sticker shock" but frankly if they were that late in the game they had to know they'd be taking a huge risk and should have just stomached the whole "sticker shock" fear.
Really disappointing.
Obama has federalized the Office Maxes and Staples
He wants a government takeover of office supplies!!
I can guarantee that it wasn't tested save for a small UAT scope. Me and Ronito work in the same field and he will tell you the same thing. The contract was subcontracted to hell and the project probably ended up in the laps of h1b workers and where corners were definitely cut. Poor guys were probably paid like shit too. Its not their fault. Government contracts are notoriously porky. Everyone makes off like rabid vultures except the guys coding at 2 am for a deadline in the morning.They did trial it, however at the last second they decided to not reveal premium prices until after signing up, even though it was thoroughly tested to do the opposite (show prices beforehand). Apparently this was to prevent "sticker shock" but frankly if they were that late in the game they had to know they'd be taking a huge risk and should have just stomached the whole "sticker shock" fear.
Really disappointing.
I actually worked on a Government contract for FDIC data mangement program initiated after 2008 meltdown. I have some really headspinning horror stories too.Not entirely surprised but somewhat surprised at Healthcare.gov.
The prelaunch QA was apparently just rubber-stamped. Launch it and hope for the best. The code quality, I fear at what that code probably looks like. Hearing insurers say they're getting the wrong information in the wrong fields, they're getting duplicates, they're not getting many applications (who knows how many applications are simply being lost), that's alarming.
Working as a developer within a bank, I can tell you from my own experience that there are way more programmers applying for jobs that absolutely cannot code than there are competent developers. I've worked on applications with the most horrible defects, the most most unmaintainable coding practices. I've seen the incredible low quality work that our bank has gotten from offshore resources (where my understanding is that hiring practices are incredibly shady), and I've also worked with people domestically that I've frankly thought should be looking for other careers, software design and programming just isn't for them. I've seen and been a part of projects doomed to failure because of misguided management, low budgets, and impossible schedules.
If there's ever an autopsy on Healthcare.gov and the ACA rollout, I'd love to read it, and I'm sure I will see a lot of familiarity.
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/anatomy-of-a-shutdown-98518.html#ixzz2i590ik9I
Awesome behind the scenes look at the shutdown. Harry Reid is a boss, boehner admitted to being limp, and everyone hates Cruz except for Obama.
The president gets up every day and reads the newspaper and thanks God that Ted Cruz is in the United States Senate, a Republican senator pointedly told Cruz at a closed-door meeting.
I see. So in your view (coders, related fields) do you think the healthcare.gov technical woes will be resolved in the next 30 days?
I don't even want to think about the long-term implications of applications already processed incorrectly and what that means for the rollout, fines, etc.
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/anatomy-of-a-shutdown-98518.html#ixzz2i590ik9I
Awesome behind the scenes look at the shutdown. Harry Reid is a boss, boehner admitted to being limp, and everyone hates Cruz except for Obama.
Anyone in IT will tell you that duplicate records is a sign of major underlying problems. Like a heart problem with a bungled surgery. Someone screwed the pooch badly here. To be honest it depends on what they are doing now and how they are handling stress, how much did they anticipate the problems, and what their new plans are. I can tell you for a fact that they probably wasted a week pointing fingers at each other. Its up in the air but I am hopeful.I see. So in your view (coders, related fields) do you think the healthcare.gov technical woes will be resolved in the next 30 days?
I don't even want to think about the long-term implications of applications already processed incorrectly and what that means for the rollout, fines, etc.
Clever selection of pictures they did to go with the article.
Honestly? I know nothing about nothing, but I wouldn't be surprised if they end up scrambling to put together something far simpler that amounts to basically something like a central place to fill out a form, get that information to health care providers in your state, some or all of whom would start emailing and calling with quotes. That can be done relatively quickly, the full exchange functionality would be taken down and relaunched next fall. The hitch in that idea is would the insurance providers be staffed to handle it, for as the article above in Incognito's post alludes to: they can handle the volume now because it's relatively low. If it gets going as advertised, they'll be slammed.
But again, I don't know what they're actually facing. The only way I see them turning around in a short amount of time is if the problems are small in nature.
It's too bad we're at full employment right now. Otherwise, the government could hire as much labor as it needed to get whatever projects it wanted finished as quickly as possible.
Does anyone here actually have liberal leaning parents?
Timing is interesting. I'm sure he was stressing over the shutdown dilemma, completely baffled as to how the place he once served turned into such a fucking circus.Tom Foley died.