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Saturday, November 30, 2013

Ever more comfortable lying without anyone believing him, Barry prepares to lie some more about his website

No longer concerned with whether anyone actually believes him Barry apparently is set to announce that his Obamacare website is all better now:
Administration officials are preparing to announce Sunday that they have met their Saturday deadline for improving HealthCare.gov, according to government officials, in part by expanding the site’s capacity so that it can handle 50,000 users at once. But they have yet to meet all their internal goals for repairing the federal health-care site, and it will not become clear how many consumers it can accommodate until more people try to use it.
Never mind that the damn thing has been in development for three years and that it was actually supposed to work two months ago when they launched it. Now, all is well, Barry says, so fuck all of you and he's going to go on vacation now. Think I'm kidding? Even money says he goes to Hawaii for about 2 weeks, and, oh yeah, that fucking website still doesn't work:
Administration officials have said for several weeks they define success as having “the vast majority of users” be able to navigate the site and sign up for insurance. While they initially did not define what that meant, White House press secretary Jay Carney said earlier this month that the administration’s aim was to have 80 percent of users enroll through the site. Those working on the project have set speed and error rates as a way of measuring that goal.
Just think if Travelocity only actually booked your flight four out of five times. Would you ever use it again? How about if only 80 percent of your orders on Amazon actually got made? Yeah, those companies would be out of business. That's why government simply can't do these kinds of projects. If they fail, there are no consequences. No one gets fired, no one can go to another company for the service, no one can do a damn thing about it.

Knowing that no one will get fired, government employees for the most part really don't give a fuck if it actually works: they will suffer no consequences. That means it won't work. Just think what would happen if a government agency responsible for fighting poverty actually succeeded and eliminated poverty. No poverty, no mission for the agency. Boom, they're all unemployed. The first mission of the bureacracy is to protect the existence of the bureaucracy. Why do you think we still have the Rural Electrification Administration? You can't make this shit up.

So Barry's web site still won't work. Probably a good thing, since if people were able to sign up in large numbers because the front end finally worked, everything would get worse on the back end where the system is unable to calculate subsidies or sent accurate information to insurers regarding applications:
The site's disastrous front end has overshadowed another set of serious problems on the back end. Insurance companies say they're seeing widespread errors in the trickle of applications they do receive through the exchanges.
And until those errors can be fixed, it might be best to leave enrollment at a trickle.
"Is CMS stupid enough to fix the front end of this thing before they fix the back end?" asked Bob Laszewski, a health care consultant who works closely with insurers.
I think the answer to that question is, "Yes."

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