It's Time For The White House To Come Clean About What's Going On With The Obamacare Website

[FarCenter]

But mostly, CMS spokeswoman Julie Battaille dodged questions and declined to disclose new information.

- Battaille claimed not to know how many of those applications came from the 36 states that do not operate their own exchanges (meaning consumers are supposed to buy coverage by navigating HealthCare.gov). How is CMS figuring out a total number of applications if not by adding together reports from state exchanges and information from the federal exchange? If they won't disclose the federal-only number, it's presumably because it's embarrassingly low and they don't want it publicly known.

- Battaille wouldn't say who, aside from Jeff Zients, is involved in the "tech surge" that is supposed to bring in bright private sector tech talents to help fix the exchange. Ezra Klein noted yesterday the administration's silence on this question, leading him to wonder whether "the scope of the surge is less impressive, and more insider-focused, than the administration is implying." Is the tech surge just a PR strategy to demonstrate action on the website's problems without having to give out more detail about them?

- She wouldn't say when CMS expects that the site will be working properly.

- Twice, she declined to answer a question about whether Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was aware of the system's problems before launch.

- She continued to emphasize website problems related to traffic (and therefore, vast consumer demand that demonstrates how great Obamacare's benefits are) when reports in many outlets, including the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, have relied on anonymous insurance industry sources to suggest that there are major problems in the exchange system's backend, including providing incorrect application information to insurers, that aren't related to traffic.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-administration-needs-answers-on-obamacare-website-2013-10

Coming clean will only happen if there is a Bradley Manning in CMS to dump the project documents to Wikileaks.

[Whisp]

1. lol.

you must be so disappointed that everyone has not yet been able to register with the wonderful ACA that the good President gave to his people. I'm sure I have seen your full throated support here of the President's ACA but now you are disappointed because so many are yet not registered...

[VanillaRhapsody]

2. Where is the DU Fainting couch...

some seem to need it..

[Kingofalldems]

3. I just called Issa's office

He'll tell us what to do.

[CatWoman]

8. *snort*

[BluegrassStateBlues]

4. The White House requested more money they needed for proper implementation.

It was denied by the GOP House.

[The Magistrate]

5. Tempest In A Tea-Pot, Sir

I can think off-hand of several hundred things which concern me more than this contrived tripe.

Bugs do not surprise me, and I expect the thing will be fixed in a reasonable span of time.

[bravenak]

6. Better get aunt PittyPat the smelling salts.

How evah will we survive the outrage? There are GLITCHES in my WEBSITE!!! We better just get rid of it. Better yet, let's get rid of the whole internet.. It's so glitchy, and virusy, and all those ads.

[NastyRiffraff]

7. LOL good one bravenak n/t

[bravenak]

10. Thanks.

I had to say something on this one.

[Rex]

9. It's fucked up because they outsourced.

They will fix it.

[longship]

11. You didn't watch PBS NewsHour last night.

It was a major story of why it happened.

You probably also do not know about Brooks's Law, nor about Fred Brooks, who understood more about software engineering than almost anybody ever.

The PBS story mentioned it!!

He even wrote a book about it, The Mythical Man Month.

Which contained as its premise Brooks' Law:

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

Yet since its first publication in 1975 and my first substantive employment in IT in the late 70's, not a single IT manager under who I slaved understood anything of what Brooks wrote. And yet he he fucking designed the IBM System 360 OS!!

Amazing that even into the 90's, when I gave it all up, not a single person I worked under understood the simple principles under Brooks' ideas. Principles he tested in practice.

Alas, it's still goes on in every single proprietary software shop on the planet. Only open source seems to get it, and fewer of them do every day.

That's why the ACA Web site is in trouble.

Oh... And the fact the Web Site engineers were given the multi thousand page bill passed by Congress and signed by the President as their design document. We've got X amount of months to implement this, and by the way, because there's going to be tectonic shifts due to total Republican opposition at both the state and federal levels, you won't be able to finalize the design... EVER!!!

And, by the way, the sands will be shifting under your feet every step of the way. Plus, when implementation comes close you'll have to work under sequester conditions, so do not expect to be paid for overtime or any raises or anything like that.