Tag Archives: Affordable Care Act

In Case You’re Concerned About Health Insurance Cancelations

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It’s the media’s current ACA crisis. In other words, a lot of sound and fury, signifying very little.

The policies being canceled are those that don’t meet the ACA’s new minimum standards. All policy holders will be able to sign up for better policies. That’s the basic story. This short article in the New York Times explains what happened at a House committee hearing today:

Republicans were apparently furious that government would dare intrude on an insurance company’s freedom to offer a terrible product to desperate people.

http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/30/the-uproar-over-insurance-cancellation-letters/

It’s worth reading, if only for its humor value.

To B Or Not To B

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That is a question. If Hamlet were with us today, would he ask himself: “To blog or not to blog?”

That’s what I asked myself this morning. Whether I should put this blog on hold.

But how can I save the world (one blog post at a time) or find out what I think if I don’t speak whereof I can?

Especially today, after a respected reader shared this letter to the editor:

When seniors started enrolling in the new Medicare system, hardly anyone touched a computer, there was no internet, or broadband connection. The system worked. Today, the same tools are available to us as were available then: applications, telephone, person-to-person help. The preferred method of access is the Internet, but the Internet is really just a way to get one into the system. The media is spending way too much time complaining about the method by which people sign up. They should be pointing out that millions of people who have not had access to health coverage will now have it. We need more stories about people with sick children who can now get coverage, not how much trouble people are having logging in to a web site. (BTW, just to see how it would work, I went to healthcare.gov and created an account. No problems. Maybe they kick in when you try to actually sign up for something.) 

I hate the media.

Me too, much of the time.

Now, in this autumn of our discontent, everyone with access to a media bullhorn should keep in mind that large information technology projects almost always have problems, especially when a “drop-dead date” is involved. The Republicans will “investigate”, silly people on TV and the radio will say stupid things (except in Afghanistan), columnists will draw the wrong conclusions, but the problems will be fixed, millions of people will benefit and, as someone said the other day, the ACA isn’t just a website.

We should also remember that most people sign up for things as the deadline approaches, and in this case the deadline (March 31, 2014) isn’t “drop-dead” at all – it’s a soft deadline that can be delayed a while, if necessary.

On the even brighter side, healthcare.gov is getting all kinds of free publicity! Let’s hope everyone spells the name right – although that’s not required these days (“did you mean healthcare.gov?”).

For the icing on the cake, take a look at how Republican politicians defended the problem-plagued rollout of the Medicare prescription drug benefit eight years ago, when one of their own was in the White House:

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/10/24/2828261/hearing-post/

“The empty vessel makes the greatest sound.” (Henry V, act 4, scene 4)

The Big Website Foul-Up (It Takes A Village)

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Major problems with the new ACA website healthcare.gov are being reported and criticized throughout the media. It’s a great story, definitely worth reporting and much easier to write about than the complexities of the new law and how it will affect millions of people.

Fortunately, states that chose to create their own websites, like California and New York, are doing better, one likely reason being that their software requirements were easier to implement. It’s states with Republican governors or legislatures that didn’t create their own websites, like Texas, Florida and New Jersey, that are especially suffering. Although there are other ways to sign up for ACA-generated health insurance (by phone, and even in person), it’s still a problem for many people who live in those Republican-governed states.

Still, it’s an especially poignant example of how Republicans often put politics above principle or pragmatism. One would think that politicians who consistently criticize the Federal government (except for the Defense Department, etc.) wouldn’t depend on a Federal website delivering health insurance to their citizens, but go figure.

It’s also a great example of how large computer projects usually fail to meet deadlines, and how corporations that sell things to the government almost always find a way to make a whole lot of money. “We will deliver X by Y for $Z” repeatedly turns into “we will deliver X- by Y+ for $Z++”. Everyone involved usually has an excuse – it’s often the fault of those other guys – but whatever happens always results from a team effort.

For more on the software development aspect of the situation, here’s an honest, accurate appraisal from someone who has clearly been in similar situations:

In fact, we software developers suck at estimating how long it will take to build a web application (it’s time that we admit that). So, if we suck at it, imagine how poorly our managers who have never written a line of code suck at it when they pull estimates out of their asses to impose on their development teams and report to their bosses.

The whole article is worth reading, although I’ll add that these problems aren’t limited to web applications, many people who give optimistic estimates have done plenty of coding, and the people doing the requirements aren’t always the most blameworthy. Software developers frequently slow down the requirements-writing process by failing to give feedback, asking for repeated clarifications, arguing about which features are necessary and failing to move forward when progress could be made. In addition, there may be good reasons to roll out software that isn’t ready (sometimes, something is better than nothing). It really is a team effort.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/17/1248260/-A-software-developer-s-view-on-the-HealthCare-gov-glitches#

Now That That’s (Almost) Over

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(until the next time…)

He’s One of Them

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Last month, the philosopher Robert Paul Wolff gave his answer to that pressing question: “why does the Right hate Obamacare?”. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind me quoting a few paragraphs:

“There is now a sizable fraction of the American public, and a considerable number of Representatives and Senators, who say that they consider Obamacare an assault on everything they hold dear, a fatal blow to the American Way, a Socialist plot to destroy life as we know it, an evil so great that it is worth bringing the government to a halt and threatening the world financial system to defund it or even slow marginally the pace at which its provisions go into effect….

The Civil Rights Movement, launched by African-Americans half a century ago, threatened, and eventually began to break down … legal, customary, residential, and employment barriers.  It was at this time that the old familiar political rhetoric about “working men and women” also began to change. The new rhetoric spoke of “middle-class Americans,” which, although no one acknowledged it, was a thinly veiled code for “not Black.”  As economic pressures mounted on those in the lower half of the income pyramid, Whites wrapped themselves in the oft-reiterated reassurance that at least they did not live in the Inner City (which is to say, Black neighborhoods), that they were “Middle Class.”  All of the political discourse came to be about the needs, the concerns, the prospects of the Middle Class, which to millions of Americans, whether they could even articulate it, meant “not Black.”

All of this crumbled, frighteningly, calamitously, disastrously, when a Black man was elected president.  “Free, white, and twenty-one” ceased to be the boast of the working-class White man. Statistics do not matter, trends do not matter, probabilities do not matter, income distribution differentials do not matter. If a Black man with a Black wife and two Black children is President of the United States, then a fundamental metaphysical break has occurred in the spiritual foundation on which White America has built its self-congratulatory self-image for three centuries and more.

Hysterical Whites tried every form of denial. Obama’s election was theft. Obama is not an American. Obama is a Muslim. Obama is a socialist…. When Obama was reelected, vast numbers of Americans went into terminal denial. They seized upon the ACA simply because it was, as everyone knew, Obama’s signature domestic accomplishment. To repeal it, to defund it, to make it as though it had never existed, would be in some measure to deny that he had ever been President. The actual details of the ACA matter not at all. Neither do the actual felt medical needs of those driven insane by the very fact of Obama’s tenure in the White House. None of that has anything at all to do with the real cause of the hysteria. Why are millions of Americans driven beyond hysteria by the ACA? 

BECAUSE OBAMA IS BLACK.”

The full text is here:

http://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2013/09/why-does-right-hate-obamacare.html