Evidently the website is susceptible to hackers.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/obamacare-healthcare-gov-hacked-clickjacking
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/obamacare-healthcare-gov-hacked-clickjacking
Evidently the website is susceptible to hackers.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/obamacare-healthcare-gov-hacked-clickjacking
the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) referred Mother Jones to this security statement, which says that Americans don't need to worry: "If a security incident occurs, an Incident Response capability would be activated, which allows for the tracking, investigation, and reporting of incidents."
Evidently the website is susceptible to hackers.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/obamacare-healthcare-gov-hacked-clickjacking
President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that after the Affordable Care Act became law, people who liked their health insurance would be able to keep it.
Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, “40 to 67 percent” of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.”
That means the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.
Everyone—even the CTO of President Obama's successful second presidential campaign—seems to have something to say about why HealthCare.gov experiences so much trouble. Today's news that the Affordable Care Act website and supporting IT infrastructure suffered from a data center outage piled more pain upon a project that members of the "tech surge" team now say will take at least another month to put in order.
The data center, operated by Verizon's Terremark unit, went down on Sunday when an equipment failure made it lose its Internet connection. Service was restored Monday morning, and services were brought gradually back online.
Data center outages happen to almost everyone in the cloud business, as Amazon and Google and Microsoft can testify to. But the structure of HealthCare.gov's deployment makes it particularly vulnerable to outages since it runs out of a single Verizon data center. That's just one more piece of a larger problem however: that rather than turning to private industry to look for best practices in running a high-volume e-commerce website, the government's team embraced the opposite approach.
Of course, they were following the same approach that big businesses have followed for decades with their big IT projects. Having watched a fair number of corporate IT projects go awry—both as a journalist and as an unwilling participant during my days as a system integrator and a corporate IT project manager—there are plenty of things in the HealthCare.gov debacle that feel all too familiar.
Worst practices
Government IT, as Ars previously reported, is no stranger to albatross IT projects. The federal government, and the US Chief Information Officer and Office of Management and Budget in particular, have tried to fix the chronic ills of big, bad IT by applying metrics and dashboards and reviews. For a brief moment, the HealthCare.gov project even showed up on the radar as a risky proposition. But the metrics that put it there were only tangentially related to the actual problems with the project itself. They focused specifically on cost and scheduling, not with the actual functionality of the system.
The real problems with HealthCare.gov are related to the "worst practices" that went into the project nearly from the beginning. Each of these missteps, combined with the generally hostile atmosphere in Washington surrounding the Affordable Care Act, nearly guaranteed HealthCare.gov would be late, broken, or both:
1) Hyper-Complexity. The HealthCare.gov project was an amalgam of three major contracts, each with its own contractor and set of deliverables: a new e-commerce site, a new information middleware infrastructure, and a hosted data center integration project.
2) Dependency issues. In addition, the whole thing was dependent on data provided by Experian—a data source that neither the government nor the other contractors could do any sort of data quality work on. Without a way to handle exceptions in Experian's data—such as a mismatch between street addresses due to a misspelling in Experian's system or just old data—the site experienced many early headaches.
3) All new construction. Many government IT projects, particularly ones that are created as the result of specific legislation, require the construction of an entirely new infrastructure. HealthCare.gov had the complexity multiplier of being based in software and systems—the "data hub" middleware that tied the site to the systems of insurance providers in particular—that had never been used live before.
4) Rolling requirements. The specifications for the project were delayed repeatedly then changed frequently up to within a month of the target release date. The tweaking resulted in design changes.
5) Anti-testing. Since the requirements kept changing up until the last minute, there was no way to do full site testing until mere weeks before the release date. It's not clear if any real-world data was used in testing the customer validation piece of the site since that would have required hitting actual Experian credit data. There was no limited release of the system for "beta testing" among a select audience, aside from the demo done by President Obama. All this despite the fact that nearly every component of the site was brand new and unproven against any real-world load.
6) Release late and once. Instead of doing a rolling release of features starting with information on what people could expect in terms of subsidies, the government committed to an all-or-nothing release date. There was no way to test the site's performance under full load as a result, and the feds couldn't gradually scale up infrastructure based on experience and testing either.
7) Anti-bugfixing. There was, based on statements from the government, no effective way to manage bug tracking across the multiple components of the site. This meant no way to identify root causes of issues and prioritize fixes at the time of launch. Instead, the contractors implemented all this after the launch. And while the data center provider had been certified as complying with government security requirements, it's not clear that there was ever any realistic capacity planning done because everything was so new.
This is by no means a conclusive list of the missteps that led to the failure to launch for HealthCare.gov. But each of these is recognizable in any number of other government technology programs and resurfaced here.
Failure is not just an option—it comes standard
Mismanagement of major programs is something of a modern government tradition. In a 2008 report, the Government Accountability Office reported that 48 percent of federal IT projects had to be "rebaselined" (restructured because of cost overages or changed in project goals)—and more than half had to be reset in such a way two or more times. And as of 2008, 43 percent of the Department of Health and Human Services' major projects were on the Office of Management and Budget's "watch list" because of poor performance and other management concerns.
Mind you, these measurements are only based on GAO's criteria. They don't address whether projects that weren't rebaselined were actually successful in achieving their goals, or if they were ever fully implemented. Even the most successful federal IT projects are often obsolete by the time they come close to completion, meaning they get rolled into the next big improvement program to come along.
Big-bet IT projects have a history of causing trauma in the private sector as well. A 2011 survey of business and IT executives found that 75 percent believed their projects were either usually or always "doomed from the start." Those expectations are firmly rooted in reality—research by Standish Group International found that in 2012, only 10 percent of projects with a value of over $10 million were successfully completed on time and within budget.
"Anyone who has written a line of code or built a system from the ground-up cannot be surprised or even mildly concerned that Healthcare.gov did not work out of the gate,” Standish Group International Chairman Jim Johnson said in a recent podcast. “The real news would have been if it actually did work. The very fact that most of it did work at all is a success in itself."
In other words, HealthCare.gov's rollout was almost identical to every Web-based ERP or CRM rollout at a major corporation. Here, the small exception was that it happened publicly with a hostile audience waiting to crow about its failures.
Interesting article from Ars here revealing more detail than I've seen more places and summarizing most of what we already know.
Yet again showing just how out of touch the naysayers are.
Not really. Most of those projects likely weren't given $300 million or 3 years to play with,
and that statistic also doesn't provide any context as to the sate in which they were in when their deadline came around.
And when you're designing a site to sell your product, and the site fucks up, the only one hurt is your company. When you're designing a site to manage a public service that in some way touches almost every American, and have $300,000,000.00 to do it, there's no excuse. Launch bugs are inevitable, but the damn thing should at least be minimally functional. What that article shows is that government bureaucracy not only sucks at getting things done, but it even sucks at properly managing its contractors. Our bureaucrats suck at being bureaucrats.
In any case, I'm sorry you felt the need to cherry pick that last snippet and ignore the rest of the article. Simple fact is healthcare.gov a disaster that should never have happened; and I've yet to hear an excuse that doesn't sound like a desperate rationalization from an over-invested Obamacare defender.
Link? And honestly, how is a $300M project not multiple years? You think that gets done in months? lol.
The nature of public programs are that they affect many people, that's the nature of government, not a knock on it. That's reality. The alternative private sector solution wasn't solving individual market problems and lord the free market had plenty of time to figure it out. Additionally, the web site is functional (fact), it's just not fully functional. That's sad but predictable, as the article notes, but nowhere in the previous several paragraphs of that article is that disputed.
Nonono. It is a false equivalence to say that since most it projects suffer issues this one is no worse. It is massively worse than most, and that article outlines why.Interesting article from Ars here revealing more detail than I've seen more places and summarizing most of what we already know.
Yet again showing just how out of touch the naysayers are.
You provided it. The criteria for inclusion in the study was a budget of $10 million or more, as mentioned in the article.
No, I think it gets done in years. Like the multiple years they were given.
Yes it's the nature of government, and it's also a reason to enforce higher quality standards. And I admit we need a public option, I simply thought and still think that Obamacare is a rather shitty public option that will do more harm than good in its current state. And thus far from what I'm seeing I'm being proven more right than wrong.
Yeah, it's so functional millions of users can't use it for its intended function. Resounding success right there. I guess you'd define Amazon.com as "functional" even if no one could buy anything.
Nonono. It is a false equivalence to say that since most it projects suffer issues this one is no worse. It is massively worse than most, and that article outlines why.
Most importantly, nobody has denied the complexity of this. My main condemnation is that something so glaringly incomplete was released. That separates it from the masses. I have seen many it projects late and over budget. Many. The difference between them and healthcare.gov is that when push comes to shove you slip the date. And if it needs to slip again it does. This means that when it gets to the users it is only "buggy", not patently, entirely and completely unusable.
You also do not change major requirements the week before go live (!) unless those changes are to materially simplify the system and "oh let's leave this till phase II" type talk.
And no the site was not meaningfully functional when it went live.
Reed, however, said he has already produced a simpler, cleaner version of the software that could run on the desktop of consumers personal computers, allowing them to create accounts, browse insurance plans and sign up for coverage all without many of the headaches that have been plaguing the governments site.
Ben Simo, a software tester based in Phoenix and a past president of the Association of Software Testers, said his involvement stemmed from trying to retrieve his own password on healthcare.gov. When he did so, he said, he found that his username and password reset code were being returned to his browser without authentication, a potential security hole.
What is even more interesting is the use of multiple different 3rd party monitoring solutions such as Google, Chartbeat and Pingdom.
It seems they forgot to merge CSS and JS files together as they are currently loading about 55! Individual JavaScript files and 11! Individual CSS files!
We could see a 16.8 second server response time for an AJAX call that returned some basic user information for the logged in user. ... Whats even more interesting is that every interaction on the MyProfile page re-sends this AJAX Request returning basically the same information again without caching it. Taking a closer look at the actual content that is returned, it seems that about 95% of the content is always the same (e.g: name, phone number, ). There is only one field in that returned JSON object that actually changes.
Response times of up to 7 seconds were mainly caused by these JavaScript frameworks that iterate through the whole DOM to identify those elements that need to be modified or not.
I wonder how much longer it will continue to be funny. We've got a hard-headed bunch of proponents for this law. This is pretty much the holy grail of liberal/progressivism. Will they ever admit failure? If so, at a point early enough to reverse the damage? There are a ton of folks that will have no coverage on Jan 1. And 11 months from now the delay of the employer mandates expire.This is such a hilarious fail I dont know what to say.
http://news.yahoo.com/day-1-of-obamacare-yielded-six-enrollees-233817649.html
6 people on the first day enrolled.
I wonder how much longer it will continue to be funny. We've got a hard-headed bunch of proponents for this law. This is pretty much the holy grail of liberal/progressivism. Will they ever admit failure? If so, at a point early enough to reverse the damage? There are a ton of folks that will have no coverage on Jan 1. And 11 months from now the delay of the employer mandates expire.
Is Obama in denial or has he told so many lies that even he believes what he says now? Earlier this week he was still lying his ass off while happy faces behind him clapped enthusiastically. The level of ignorance in the nation is enormous and growing. Their votes must be courted.
The control of this enormous of a portion of the economy. Big government.Individual mandate (aka personal responsibility) to buy private insurance is the holy grail of liberal/progressivism?
I wonder how much longer it will continue to be funny. We've got a hard-headed bunch of proponents for this law. This is pretty much the holy grail of liberal/progressivism. Will they ever admit failure? If so, at a point early enough to reverse the damage? There are a ton of folks that will have no coverage on Jan 1. And 11 months from now the delay of the employer mandates expire.
Is Obama in denial or has he told so many lies that even he believes what he says now? Earlier this week he was still lying his ass off while happy faces behind him clapped enthusiastically. The level of ignorance in the nation is enormous and growing. Their votes must be courted.
The control of this enormous of a portion of the economy. Big government.
Oh yes, the holy grail of liberal/progressivism is a plan made by the Heritage Foundation to preserve free market incentives, pricing mechanisms, and corporate profits.
In reality, it's a GOP plan put forth as a compromise, and a sizable part of the opposition to Obamacare is from people who realize that we would be much, much better off with the same system as the rest of the first world enjoys.
All that said, it's still a LONG way from irretrievably 'failing.' It's definitely flawed, but if the Congress was willing to be grown-ups, it could pass fixes for lots of its flaws right now (and more as new problems reveal themselves). It could fail. But it will take at least a half-decade more to tell, probably more like 10-15 years. Considering there is no alternative out there other than a truly irretrievably fucked status quo ante and single-payer, I doubt there's going to be any change until it's had a good long opportunity to find its legs. As much as Fox wants you to believe the whole nation is hopping mad about it, most people don't really care that much right now, and will form their opinions slowly instead of regurgitating talking points about it.
Oh yes, the holy grail of liberal/progressivism is a plan made by the Heritage Foundation to preserve free market incentives, pricing mechanisms, and corporate profits.
In reality, it's a GOP plan put forth as a compromise, and a sizable part of the opposition to Obamacare is from people who realize that we would be much, much better off with the same system as the rest of the first world enjoys.
All that said, it's still a LONG way from irretrievably 'failing.' It's definitely flawed, but if the Congress was willing to be grown-ups, it could pass fixes for lots of its flaws right now (and more as new problems reveal themselves). It could fail. But it will take at least a half-decade more to tell, probably more like 10-15 years. Considering there is no alternative out there other than a truly irretrievably fucked status quo ante and single-payer, I doubt there's going to be any change until it's had a good long opportunity to find its legs. As much as Fox wants you to believe the whole nation is hopping mad about it, most people don't really care that much right now, and will form their opinions slowly instead of regurgitating talking points about it.
By then, we are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was like in America when men were free...10-15 years to know if Obamacare failed? Or is that how long it will take to get the website up?
By then, we are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was like in America when men were free...