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PoliGAF 2013 |OT3| 1,000 Years of Darkness and Nuclear Fallout

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PJV3

Member
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.

You should play him that Ann Coulter interview where she sneers at the non voters, they love the left being uninvolved.
 
Some dispiriting reports regarding the rollout of the ACA, courtesy of the WSJ and NR.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304410204579142141827109638

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 increases—up to 7 million consumers are expected to sign up in the next 5½ months—that 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.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/361577/assessing-exchanges-yuval-levin

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 couldn’t 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 it’s surely not the only possible explanation. Whatever the cause, that decision has created crippling problems that are still largely unresolved.

...

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 system—especially but not exclusively at the federal level.

One key worry is based on the fact that what they’re facing is not a situation where it is impossible to buy coverage but one where it is possible but very difficult to buy coverage. That’s 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 coverage—the dream consumer so essential to the design of the exchange system—will 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 don’t 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.

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.
 

The Technomancer

card-carrying scientician
Does anyone here actually have liberal leaning parents? it seems no one has ever mentioned this?

Yeah, my parents are pretty staunch social democrats. They think the republican party is repulsive especially these days. They've gotten a bit more cynical over the years (in particular my mom and I are now trying to keep my dad from thinking that the welfare system is a significant drain on his tax dollars) but they're both hardcore Obama supporters because they haven't lost perspective on just how much he got done that brief time he had congress. And they're both self employed, so healthcare reform is potentially huge for our family.
 

FLEABttn

Banned
My mom is fully on progressive though she was a Republican up through the 80s. The Reagan era of the GOP changed that. My Dad says he doesn't like parties and labels and says he's conservative but 70% of the time he's going to vote Democrat, 15% Green, 10% Libertarian, and 5% Republican.
 

demon

I don't mean to alarm you but you have dogs on your face
My mom's a straight Dem voter. My dad usually votes Democrat but he becomes more and more socialist with age; he's pretty disappointed with Obama. My mom rolls her eyes and gets a little upset when my dad criticizes Obama.
 

teiresias

Member
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.

My mom is somewhat liberal socially, but buys into some of the Republican fiscal policy BS. She is a child of her parents though, and her father still makes liberal use of the N-word to refer to the black population, so one can only expect so much - she's never been overtly racist in my presence however. My stepfather is probably about the same temperament as my mom politically I think.

My real dad is quite a staunch Democrat though I hesitate to actually use the term liberal. He pretty much just thinks Republicans are crazy nowadays and refuses to vote for any of them. He's also been a bachelor for nearly two decades now (since my parents got divorced), has a better gaming PC then I do, and spends all of his free time plopped in front of his Razer Nostromo and joystick playing Mechwarrior Online (with a little sign taped to his keyboard to remind him not to swear at people through his headset), so for a 60+ year old he's pretty cool. Haha.
 
My parents are liberal. My dad is a union electrician. Not religious either. Grew up catholic, but my mom is now a diest who reads Brian Green physics books in her spare time now. She used to teach.

I am more liberal than they are though. I've watched my dad's opinion on gay rights change over the years which is cool. Lot of arguing about that though. Baby boomers prejudices have been deeply ingrained, so I give him a lot of credit for his shift.
 

Diablos

Member
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.
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.

It is particularly worrisome that insurance companies are now getting invalid data from potential customers, often numerous times.

At this point they may just want to take it offline and redesign the whole thing. Put the e-mail/phone # of everyone who signed up in an automated message afterwards instructing them to sign up again.

Obama wouldn't budge in order to protect his health care law, and I don't blame him one bit, but this is some sick, sick irony and is going to make for continued bad press.

If indeed insurance companies are getting flooded with bogus data, how do we even know January is going to be long enough for them to sort it out?
 

KingGondo

Banned
Pretty sure my parents have pretty progressive social views, although it doesn't come up much.

My dad is a "fiscal conservative," i.e. he wants to pay less in taxes and thinks the taxes he does pay get wasted by the feds. I think that's the main unifying factor among "fiscal conservatives" nowadays.
 
Given these issues, it wouldn't surprise me if they pushed back the individual mandate a month to give the site admins time to fix it and to make allowances for the people who tried to be good and enroll right away only to run into roadblocks.

Thing is, the more it gets backed up, the worse it'll get.
 
My dad's super conservative. Drives me nuts, too. He's a Vietnam vet, and is basically voting against his own best self-interests. "Dad, you paid extra into Social Security so that you would get more back when you retired, and you get disability for your Agent Orange exposure/related problems (not cancer so far, luckily, but some of the other stuff). Republicans have repeatedly said they want to take those things away, why are you voting for them?!"

Politically, I'm a centrist (which in America these days means I'm a liberal).
 

xnipx

Member
Can we blame this on republicans? Make up a fake story about how the RNC made some suspicious donations to the contracted companies earlier this summer? They lie all the time why can't we? Lol somebody start the chain email
 

gcubed

Member
My dad isn't super political, we talk once in a while but he usually ends it with "I always make more money when democrats are in office" and then he pours me another drink and changes the subject.

I recently moved to the bay area into a start up in SV... It's strange to me to be surrounded by anti-republicans, but most of my coworkers arr from Berkeley, Europe or Asia. I've always lived in republican areas so it was shocking to have a lunch conversation about politics (I would never talk to coworkers about politics before, not worth the aggravation)
 
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.
Yes

My mom isn't too into politics but she seems to follow my Dad who is liberal
 
Holy shit I was having the same problems. There is NO place in website to add your spouse. It goes from you to your household, which is "children". I had the good sense not to submit my wife under household but it looks like other people did and it screwed up. What a fucking disaster.
 

pigeon

Banned
I would strongly recommend reading the whole Levin post. It's very frightening, but he does conclude by noting that his assessment is that things are probably not as bad as people are reporting, they're just stuck in a huge crisis situation and are starting to take everything as gospel.

I honestly think it's still too early to judge how bad the situation is. I mean, it's obviously terrible, but the real question is whether the exchanges can get to a reasonably usable state (on the user end) by Thanksgiving or so, since that's when the publicity campaigns are set to roll out. If people can use the federal exchange by then, even if the data that's produced is messy, they'll at least be on record. Cleaning up the applications and data sets on the insurance end is a horrible problem, admittedly, but the deadline on that is January, not November.

The other thing to consider is that, in the states with functioning exchanges, things are going relatively well. If the law works well in states with exchanges and poorly in states with federal exchanges, that's at worst a successful proof-of-concept.
 
Why couldn't they all use the California system where you put age, family size, income and zip and it sits out prices and plan options?

I've been fishing for numbers for weeks
 
I suppose since we're talking about our parents' politics, I'll mention mine. My Dad is a State Employee (he works for our State Office of Energy and Planning), so he's pretty Democratic. He likes hiking a lot so he likes to focus on environmental and conservation issues. My Mom is a teaching assistant in the public school system so she likes to focus on educational issues like No Child Left Behind. Also they're both members of their respective unions (SEA and NEA respectively), so there's that angle, too. My mom was even one of the negotiators for her union once... she said they had to pretty much just roll over and accept the city's terms for their contract deal... Also we go to a pretty liberal church so there's also the "helping-the-poor-and-sick-etc." angle to their liberalism. It's kind of weird because most of my grandparents were traditional Eisenhower-style conservatives, so I don't know how they turned out as left-leaning as they did... It's also weird, because my Mom's parents were relatively more liberal than my Dad's parents were (well at least her dad was), and her siblings turned out way more conservative than my Dad's siblings...
 

PJV3

Member
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.
 

Diablos

Member
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.
 

PJV3

Member
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.

That's pretty bad, I'm interested in the US having a decent health system from just a humane perspective, the shitty Republican plan combined with the terrible rollout is disheartening.
 
My parents passed away long ago, but were moderate Republicans, more liberal (for the time) on social issues particularly race. I'm say they were casually racist but intended to be open-minded and not racist, and the ethic stuck with me. I don't know how they felt about gay marriage, probably OK with it (or civil unions at least). But on economics they were pretty much pure GOP. Before current levels of crazy, of course.


My in-laws are in their mid-60s and pretty solid New England liberals. I think my father in law tasted a little Truth Kool Aid but I don't think it stuck.
 
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 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.
 
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.
 
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.
I actually worked on a Government contract for FDIC data mangement program initiated after 2008 meltdown. I have some really headspinning horror stories too.
 

GhaleonEB

Member

Diablos

Member
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.
 
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.

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.
 

Crisco

Banned
Yeah I dunno, I've worked in Health IT for a few years now, and I call tell you that those back end problems aren't surprising. The problem with electronic clinical data is that nothing is standardized. Standards do exist, several of them in fact, which is part of the problem. When a private company, like health insurance companies, start building out their system, they either choose one of several existing standards or create their own schemas and data models.

For a website like HealthCare.gov to work, there needs to be some sort of meta data repository that keeps track of how different data fields get transcoded to something the individual insurance company systems will understand. I imagine that's where the problem lies, incorrect or incomplete metadata. So healthcare.gov thinks its sending "2" with the code for "children" but it's actually sending "2" with the code for "spouse". It's probably right for one insurance companies system, but not another.

And that's just the data layer, who the hell knows what sort of standards they are using for transmitting the data. If it were me, the law would have included a mandate for health insurance companies to implement a simple REST API that would trivialize sending/receiving data, but I doubt that happened.

In short, health IT is a clusterfuck, and there's no telling how long it could take to fix. It all depends on the manpower and how cooperative the health insurance companies are being.
 
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.

Clever selection of pictures they did to go with the article.

131710_pelosi_mcconnell_reid_obama_cruz_boehner_ryan_aps_605.jpg
 
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.
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.
 

Diablos

Member
Haha, shit.

How fucked up would it be if the ACA fails not because of the GOP, but because of the law's inability to deal with technical issues that the Democrats have had three years to address?

If they can't fix this by the end of open enrollment... they might have to... delay the individual mandate.
 
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.
 
It's so fucking stupid. Out of all of the things to mess up with the law, you mess up the implementation of it--the most important part.

This is just such a stupid reason for things to be failing.
 

Diablos

Member
Perhaps instead of delaying the mandate they could just extend open enrollment. Granted, there are still 164 days left. But it could be extended another 30-45 days if, say, it takes a little over a month for this to be resolved.
 

Zona

Member
Does anyone here actually have liberal leaning parents?

Sort of? My dad and his side of the family are more politically involved. My Grandfather is a Tea Party member and my fathers a Rockefeller republican who still votes with the party out of habit. It's not a family event without a political argument, I've started bringing citations.

My dads views perplex me really, he works for the FAA as an Air traffic Controller. The people he votes for don't even screw him in some abstract, nebulous way. He's this platonic ideal of voting against ones own interests.

My mothers side mostly Democrats but their almost all low information low involvement voters. When they vote at all that is. Their an Irish family from New York, I think they just default to Democrat.

Honestly I may have ended up liberal because of my father. He would always have talk radio on in the car when I was young and it annoyed the shit out of me. As I got older I started looking up whatever issue's the Bob Grant or whatever loud mouth was on brought up. I found the arguments against their positions to be much stronger and started drifting left.
 
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