Sebelius: No, we are not starting the ObamaCare site from scratch, and no, I do not have time to testify before Congress

POSTED AT 5:31 PM ON OCTOBER 19, 2013 BY ERIKA JOHNSEN

If you were wondering whether the increasing pile of evidence indicating that HealthCare.Gov’s problems are not merely opening “glitches” but deep-seated design defects — as well as the growing chorus of IT experts suggesting that the Obama administration might want to consider starting over on the badly bungled project — would have any effect whatsoever on their determination to plow forward with their arbitrary and political deadlines… don’t hold your breath. HHS Secretary Sebelius would like you to know that completely rebuilding the website is just not gonna’ happen, via the WSJ:

After two weeks of review, the HHS secretary concluded, “We didn’t have enough testing, specifically for high volumes, for a very complicated project.”

The online insurance marketplace needed five years of construction and a year of testing, she said: “We had two years and almost no testing.” …

Overall, she said, the website is functional and “we will hit the mark” within the law’s six-month open enrollment period that began Oct. 1. “I’m not throwing out the system and starting over,’” she said. …

Mrs. Sebelius convenes meetings, often three times a day, to monitor progress against the technological snafus. “I can’t fix the website myself,” she said. “But I’m working around the clock to find out what we know in extraordinary and honest detail, hold our contractors and our team accountable, and accelerate the timeline to resolve the problems.”

Gee, “not enough testing” — ya’ think? Isn’t “accelerating the timeline” what got us into this mess?

And as for working “working around the clock,” I find it rather interesting that Secretary Sebelius finds “scheduling conflicts” to be a passable excuse for refusing to appear in front of Congress next week to answer what many on the Right and the Left now agree are reasonable questions about why the administration insisted upon moving forward with a product that at least somebody over there knew wasn’t ready, and yet she seems to have the time to attend galas in the meantime. Most curious, really, as CNN pointed out on Friday:

The WSJ editors are not impressed:

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is even refusing to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in a hearing this coming Thursday. HHS claims she has scheduling conflicts, but we hope she isn’t in the White House catacomb under interrogation by Valerie Jarrett about her department’s incompetence.

The department is also refusing to make available lower-level officials who might detail the source or sources of this debacle. Ducking an investigation with spin is one thing. Responding with a wall of silence to the invitation of a duly elected congressional body probing the use of more than half a billion taxpayer dollars is another. This Obama crowd is something else.

Doctors prepare for Obamacare race to the bottom

POSTED AT 8:31 AM ON OCTOBER 19, 2013 BY JAZZ SHAW

Brought to you courtesy of the always intuitive Vodkapundit, Doctors in New York aren’t too sure about signing up the people who somehow make it through the failed internet maze of Obamacare to get on the government health insurance train.

New York doctors are feeling queasy about ObamaCare — and many won’t participate in the new national insurance program because they fear they’ll go broke, The Post has learned.

“ObamaCare is going to send me more patients to see and then cut the payments to provide the care — that’s what’s going to happen,” predicted Donald Moore, a primary-care doctor in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. “I will not accept it.”

Moore claims that President Obama made a big mistake by requiring uninsured residents to obtain medical coverage from for-profit insurers through the ObamaCare health exchanges instead of through public health programs like Medicaid.

Under tremendous pressure to keep costs down and profits up, Moore said he’s concerned that commercial insurers will pay doctors less for patient visits and services than either Medicaid or Medicare.

Let’s be fair here… who could possibly have predicted this? A system which is now signing up a fair – if not large – number of high risk, high usage patients on programs where private providers are relying on a ton of healthy, low cost patients paying into the system. What could go wrong? I know you’re shocked, but these plans which are going to offer little to no cost offset to people of still fairly modest means (read: 40K of income or so) may find them willing to pay the initially small penalty and not participate. So the providers in question will rely on being compensated by private insurance companies who suddenly aren’t seeing the promised income boost. And that’s a formula for what?

Despite a much publicized rollout, many other doctors said they haven’t decided whether to become ObamaCare providers, because they haven’t been notified by insurers or the state about reimbursement rates.

“I have not spoken with anyone who has made a decision to participate in the exchanges. We simply don’t have any information about which we can make a decision,” said Dr. Paul Orloff, president of the New York County Medical Society.

“We have no idea what the reimbursements will be or what the claims-form process will entail.”

A few word from McQ:

Yes, the enthusiasm for the new system is, well, overwhelming, isn’t it? Of course they want to see the impact on the bottom line – they’re small business owners. Government is involved in price fixing and they’d like to see if they can live with the fixed price or not. If any other entity was involved in doing what the government is involved in here, they’d have been arrested.

But hey, when government decides it can make legal for itself what is illegal for you (consider the lottery, for instance) then you know you’re on the fast road to total decline. The sign posts are whipping by so fast, no one can even read them anymore.

When you stop and think about this for the umpteenth time, doctors are looking at a system which is relying on the cost model of a privately run, profit driven industry (the insurance part of it) to pay for something being driven by a not for profit government scheme. And when the government’s anticipated participation levels don’t materialize, either from a lack of interest in a bad deal or the fact that potential customers can’t even access the system, the profits for the insurers don’t show up on their bottom line. Do they suck up the loss or attempt to pass the cost on to the health care providers? That one should be obvious. And if the doctors, who are also private business owners in large part, can’t recoup their own costs to deliver their services, where does the plan go from there?

Let’s all put on our thinking caps and play the Jeopardy music.

Industry source tells NRO: WH may have to consider “unthinkable options” if website meltdown continues into November

POSTED AT 11:21 AM ON OCTOBER 18, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

Today’s must-read comes from Yuval Levin, who spoke to five managers at the HHS department that’s running Healthcare.gov and three health-insurance industry managers. Their reactions to two weeks of total chaos on the site: “Restrained panic” from the former and more or less pants-wetting panic from the latter. I don’t think this qualifies as the news story we’re all waiting for because Levin has no sources up the chain in the decision-making parts of the executive branch, but if people in the industry are whispering about “unthinkable options” now, rest assured that people in the White House are too.

I can’t excerpt all the parts that are noteworthy, although if you’ve been following news about the Healthcare.gov apocalypse you already know some of what Levin reports — the login fiasco is a result of HHS demanding that people create an account before seeing what plans cost, the system still can’t calculate subsidies correctly (which means some people are getting the wrong price when they buy coverage), the “back end” communications between the federal data hub and private insurers are a shambles, and the chaos will only increase if HHS solves the login problems without solving the back end problems. (Imagine insurers having to sift through 5,000 garbled enrollments per day instead of 50.) What about the timeline, though? Per Levin’s sources, D-Day will come sometime in mid-November.

If the problems now plaguing the system are not resolved by mid-November and the flow of enrollments at that point looks like it does now, the prospects for the first year of the exchanges will be in very grave jeopardy. Some large advertising and outreach campaigns are also geared to that crucial six-week period around Thanksgiving and Christmas, so if the sites are not functional, all of that might not happen—or else might be wasted. If that’s what the late fall looks like, the administration might need to consider what one of the people I spoke with described as“unthinkable options” regarding the first year of the exchanges…

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. They would love it if the administration could shut down the exchange system, at least the federal one, until the interface problems can be addressed. But they know this is impossible.

Sick people with preexisting conditions whose coverage will be very expensive for insurers will spend all day on the site trying to sign up. Young, healthy people, whose money insurers desperately need to help pay for that very expensive coverage for sick people, might try once or twice and then give up. Result: A giant bill for insurance companies with no way to pay it except by jacking up premiums on everyone who currently has insurance, and even that might not be enough. That’s the death spiral, and that’s why “unthinkable” options are suddenly, but inevitably, on the table.

Levin suspects that, at the barest minimum, the White House will have to extend the deadline for the uninsured to enroll past March 31st of next year, but that’s just a fig leaf given that D-Day will have come months earlier and that, per USA Today, it’ll take six months of retoolingto get the site in shape. (Levin’s sources told him bluntly that they don’t know how long it’ll take to fix it, which I assume is industry-speak for “not soon enough.”) One thing they mightbe able to do, I would think, is turn Healthcare.gov from a data hub designed to make comparison shopping for plans and enrollment nice and easy into a site that simply points users to the webpages of individual insurance companies and encourages them to enroll there. That’ll make comparing plans much more difficult — see yesterday’s post about trying to sort through the fine print of the gold, silver, and bronze plans for insurers X, Y, Z across nine different web pages — but it’s an alternative to suspending ObamaCare for a year. Or is it?

Many health insurance products currently on the market don’t meet Obamacare’s benefit standards and consumer protections so they are being discontinued. Consumers with these plans are the most likely to see rate increases next year, especially if they earn too much to get tax credits. “They’ve got to convert to a new policy — no ifs, ands or buts about it,” Laszewski said.

And while people who currently pay for their own health insurance are likely to do whatever they can to remain covered, buying a plan directly from an insurance carrier or using a private online broker isn’t what Obamacare promised, and tax-credit subsidies aren’t available without the federal system. Moreover, these private companies aren’t prepared to deal with millions of customers who were supposed to be using the government marketplace, Laszewski said…

If these problems persist longer — weeks, months, a whole year — the entire Obamacare project falls apart, Laszewski said: “It’s a holy shit moment.”

Insurance company webpages may be slightly out of date, they may not be prepared for a crush of traffic (although they’ll certainly be more prepared than Healthcare.gov was), and, most importantly, they won’t be able to reduce “rate shock” among lower- and middle-class customers by telling them up front how much taxpayer money they’ll get to help pay for their new plan. Maybe you could manage that for now by telling people something vague, like “If you make between $X and $Y, you’re likely to receive a subsidy roughly equivalent to $Z” and then try to deal with the precise calculations later, but when will those calculations be made? Will it be before January, when these lower-income people need the money to offset the cost of their expensive new plan? Could even private companies pull together a stopgap tech project like this with just a month’s lead time? See now why people in the industry are wetting themselves?

One last reason to read Levin’s piece: Desperate for a silver lining about the rollout, lefties are touting the fact that the state exchanges are running comparatively smoothly. That’s true, say Levin’s sources, but that’s a low bar. Quote: “Back-end data issues seem to be a problem everywhere, and some of the early enrollment figures being released by the states are not matching up with insurance company data about enrollments in those states, which suggests a breakdown in communication that is only beginning to be understood.” The states may be doing better, but “doing better” doesn’t necessarily mean enrolling enough people via a glitchy system to avert a death spiral. Exit quotation via HuffPo: “[F]ailure of this magnitude would discredit a core premise of this presidency, that government can do big things to improve Americans’ lives.”

and....

Obamacare sites pirated copyrighted web scripts, British company plans to sue

Published time: October 18, 2013 16:52

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Maryland exchange, model of Obamacare implementation, won’t be fixed until December

POSTED AT 10:01 PM ON OCTOBER 17, 2013 BY MARY KATHARINE HAM

Since the day the Affordable Care Act passed Congress, the state of Maryland has been among the most eager to implement it, and among the most likely to launch an exchange smoothly. It’s a thoroughly blue state populated by politicians who pride themselves on the state’s hefty and experienced health care bureaucracy.

Maryland’s Gov. Martin O’Malley, a presidential aspirant happy to charge forth with the Obamacare banner, held a press conference the day after its passage proclaiming the Old Line State’s intention to tow the line. In 2009, as the Obamacare debate raged, he declared Maryland uniquely suited to the task: a state of a “manageable size” and with more “PHDs per capita than any other state in the union.”

“[H]igh technology, IT, is one of our core strengths, one of our ‘economic and talent strengths’ as a state,” O’Malley said.

O’Malley’s certainty was one of the reasons President Obama chose Maryland for a speech in September touting Obamacare exchanges on the eve of their debut:

“Now, this is real simple,” Obama told a crowd at Prince George’s Community College. “It’s a website where you can compare and purchase affordable health insurance plans, side-by-side, the same way you shop for a plane ticket on Kayak, same way you shop for a TV on Amazon. You just go on and you start looking, and here are all the options.”

But a week into its launch, the Maryland exchange had reportedly enrolled only 326 people.

A week later, the number had improved to just a little over 1,000, and O’Malley told reporters it could be six weeks before the exchange website was working smoothly.

“My sense of it is, probably for the next month or so, month and a half, we will be working out glitches in the portal,” he said.

That timeline should frighten the administration, whose disastrous federal exchange site is arguably more broken than Maryland’s, with much more asked of it.

It’s likely already scaring Dr. Peter Beilenson, whose Evergreen Health Co-Op is a new non-profit health company entirely dependent on the exchanges for enrollees. His concerns about the glitch-ridden system last week take on more significance in the wake of O’Malley’s announcement.

“If this were November 15th, I’d be really, really worried,” Beilenson told a Baltimore radio station. “[But] this being October 9th, I’m not terribly worried at this point, because I’m sure they’ll get this thing up and running better.”

Beilenson’s comment touches on the real timeline for improving exchanges. The deadline for citizens to purchase health insurance to prevent a penalty is mid-February, but applications for those who have managed to sign up are supposed to be processed by Jan.1. The deadline may be much sooner, as Megan McArdle explained, to prevent the “death spiral” that happens when too few young, health people sign up, the preponderance of older sicker people makes premiums spike, and more young, healthy people drop insurance because it’s no longer affordable. “Rinse and repeat and you have effectively destroyed the market for individual insurance policies.”

In the private sector, this system would already have been rolled back, probably less than 48 hours after it was rolled out. The government has more time, but not that much more, because every day they wait adds to the chaos that will occur if they have to pull the plug in December. If the system cannot reliably process 50 percent of its users on Nov. 1 — and I mean from end to end, including sending a valid enrollment file to the insurer — then the administration should ask for a one-year delay of Obamacare’s various regulations, including the individual mandate. Congress, including Republicans, should be ready to give it to them, with no strings attached.

Perhaps Nov. 1 seems too aggressive to you. I chose that date because it’s when Jon Kingsdale, who ran the Massachusetts exchange for its first five years, said we would be “really in deep doo-doo.” Well, let’s say Nov. 15 — the date when almost all the experts I’ve heard say we really need to be running at full speed, to handle the crush of applications sure to come between Thanksgiving and the mid-December deadline for buying insurance that starts in January.

O’Malley’s estimate puts Maryland’s exchange running well, in a best-case scenario, in mid-November. Using the outside limit of his guess, it’s the beginning of December. Realistically, using a politics-to-English translator, it’s much later than that.

This is the state that prides itself on passing a health reform bill in 1993 when the nation did not. This is the state that’s a perennial leader in the number of health care mandates it places on businesses and consumers, and has the army of health regulatory bodies to match.

Even when the administration delayed important rules to prevent them becoming election fodder, Maryland forged ahead without. Formed by state legislation in early 2011, the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange Board met at least once a month starting in June 2011 to plan the build. The board, ironically, has a thorough and functioning website of its own. A calendar of events lists more than 200 meetings of exchange officials, working, business, and community groups about the exchanges over the last two years.

There was an undercurrent of apprehension at board meetings, but optimistic assessments and sunny PowerPoints papered over the real problems. At a December 2012 town hall meeting, exchange Chief Information Officer Kevin Yang joked that you could identify the IT guys in the room because they were the ones “sweating profusely.”

“We’re still waiting for certain standards to become official which is presenting some challenges …as far as timing,” Yang said, when asked in 2012 about delayed rule-making from the feds affecting their “aggressive” timetable.

At a spring meeting, board members engaged in a bit of tragicomic foreshadowing, as they discussed disappointing focus-grouping. It showed citizens’ principal doubts about exchanges: They “have had bad experiences with government programs” and had “built up their defenses surrounding health insurance and anything government related,” researcher Colleen Learch of KRC Research informed them. The solution, board members agreed, was a messaging one, not a technical one.

“We have to make sure the messaging breaks down those defenses,” Learch said.

Jonathan Cohn, a health care reporter at The New Republic and an Obamacare supporter, declared in 2011, “none are moving as quickly, or effectively, to follow through on the law as Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley.”

Sarah Kliff, now a health reporter at the Washington Post, noted Maryland’s healthcare exchange progress was so rapid, it had “caught the attention of the Obama administration.”

If there was ever a state that was, in good faith, trying hard to get an exchange operational, Maryland was it.

And, yet, Maryland produced a disaster that may not be fixed in time to prevent the “death spiral.” The minutes of the last exchange board meeting before the launch betray no serious worry about what was about to happen, though there was a closed board meeting in September that may have been more colorful:

Chairman Sharfstein welcomed everyone and commended the continued work of the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange (MHBE)
staff as open enrollment begins on October 1st. Ms. Pearce commented on the MHBE’s continued preparation and testing of the various systems.

At its Oct. 8 meeting, the board was tallying paper applications (866) and “implementing work-arounds.”

Back in 2009, when O’Malley was touting Maryland as the ideal state to lead ambitious national health reform, he had some words for anyone who doubted the federal government could pull it off:

Just because it’s not easy doesn’t mean that it doesn’t need to get done. And just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean that it won’t get done. It’s amazing what happens if we stick to the goal, if we keep pounding on those beliefs that unite us.

We’re coming off of eight years of a President who was very adept at belittling government and undermining any public confidence in our ability as a people to still get big things done through our government. But we’re turning the corner on that.

Yet when the Bush administration built a federal exchange for Medicare Part D—a bumpy implementation of its own in some ways— it anticipated “20,000 simultaneous users and built capacity for 150,000,” prompting the USA Today editorial board to proclaim, “That’s the difference between competence and incompetence.”

A little more healthy skepticism from Obamacare supporters like O’Malley about what the federal government could “get done” might have helped them actually get it done.

http://www.infowars.com/obama-administration-caught-in-blatant-software-piracy-script-powering-healthcare-gov-ripped-off-from-uk-company/

( How ironic considering the war on piracy ! )

Obama administration caught in blatant software piracy; script powering Healthcare.gov ripped off from UK company

Mike Adams
Natural News
October 18, 2013

The Obama administration has been caught red-handed engaged in software piracy. Computer code used on Healthcare.gov was stolen (and then modified in an effort to conceal the theft) from a UK company called Spry Media.

Image: Obamacare.

To my best knowledge, this story was broken by WeeklyStandard.com in a blog authored by Jeryl Bier.

The computer code that was stolen is called DataTables, and it is exclusively provided under a GPL v2 license which requires anyone who uses the software code to keep the copyright notice visible in the code itself. This allows the original author of the code to receive attribution for creating it.

An analysis of the code running Healthcare.gov reveals that the Obamacare development team maliciously removed the copyright notice and credit attributions from the code while copying and using the rest of the code. In the field of journalism, this would be called “plagiarism.” In the field of computer software, it’s called “piracy” according to the U.S. government.

Here’s an image capture of the copyright notice which is supposed to remain in the code:

On Healthcare.gov, however, the copyright attribution is removed, leaving only the functional code of the script (which is a piracy violation):

Nearly all of the remainder of the script is identical to the Spry Media code, proving beyond any doubt that the Obama administration pirated this code in its construction of the failed website Healthcare.gov.

The Weekly Standard says they contacted SpryMedia for a comment: “A representative for the company said that they were ‘extremely disappointed’ to see the copyright information missing and will be pursuing it further with the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that runs the Healthcare.gov site.”

Will DHS now seize Healthcare.gov?

The Department of Homeland Security has seized hundreds of other websites that it says were engaged in piracy.

These website seizures are conducted completely outside of law and utterly without due process. When sites are seized by DHS, the following notice is placed on the website home page:

This notice reads, in part:

Willful copyright infringement is a federal crime that carries penalties for first time offenders of up to five years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine, forfeiture and restitution.

Will the developers of Healthcare.gov who pirated the DataTables software from SpryMedia now be sentenced to federal prison?

Don’t hold your breath on that one. Prisons aren’t used to lock up actual criminals anymore. They are “work camps” with the sole purpose of locking up black Americans so they can be exploited as a “human resource” of ultra-cheap labor. Yes, the prison labor industry needs more output, and that’s why the entire “war on drugs” is allowed to continue even though it is a complete failure.

Sounds like Obamacare, come to think of it: A disastrous program that wastes billions of dollars while enslaving innocent Americans in a system where they will be financially raped for life.

Am I the only one who thinks we might be better off if we forced all politicians to trade places with all prison inmates?

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/obamacare-woes-widen-as-insurers-get-wrong-data-2013-10-18

Former official: Admin refused to bring in outside help for ObamaCare website for fear GOP would subpoena them; Update: Ten-year-old technology? Update: No improvement in week two; Update: Wasn’t tested until days before launch?

POSTED AT 4:41 PM ON OCTOBER 17, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

Via Lachlan Markay and Ace, who calls it “Nixonian.” This is the rare Hot Air item that might actually make liberals angrier at the White House than conservatives. If you’d staked your party’s credibility on realizing the utopian dream of universal health care only to have Obama deliver this fartburger, you’d be furious. Why anyone on either side still wants Sebelius in charge, I have no idea.

Facing such intense opposition from congressional Republicans, the administration was in a bunker mentality as it built the enrollment system, one former administration official said. Officials feared that if they called on outsiders to help with the technical details of how to run a commerce website, those companies could be subpoenaed by Hill Republicans, the former aide said. So the task fell to trusted campaign tech experts.

Very important to understand: Between this and the fact that HHS deliberately hid the price of insurance behind a reg wall on Healthcare.gov to reduce “rate shock,” the grand takeaway about the website’s failure is that O and his team made it much worse than it needed to be because they were terrified of transparency. And the reason they were terrified of transparency, both in the case of hiding the cost of the premiums from web users and hiding the site’s architectural problems from contractors who might be hauled before Congress, is because they know they’ve delivered a bad product. Put the premiums on the front page and the public, expecting “affordable care,” would recoil at the truth. Put the contractors at the witness table before Issa’s committee and the public, expecting that the government would “fix” health care, would recoil upon discovering that they can’t even build a website with three years’ lead time.

I don’t know what’s more amazing, that they’d place their own political comfort above creating a smoother user experience for the uninsured or that they somehow didn’t realize that a botched rollout on October 1 would be far more embarrassing than contractors talking to Republicans under oath. Or … would it? What was HHS so worried that outside contractors would tell the GOP that they preferred to risk total chaos on the exchanges during launch month instead?

Apropos of nothing, Reuters is now reporting that the budget for the site exploded earlier this year as the Hopenchange brain trust realized they were way, way, way off course. And by “exploded,” I mean “tripled”:

How and why the system failed, and how long it will take to fix, remains unclear. But evidence of a last-minute surge in spending suggests the needs of the project were growing well beyond the initial expectations of the contractor and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“Why this went from a ceiling of $93.7 million to $292 million is hard to fathom,” said Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group that analyzes government contracting.

“Something changed. It suggests they ran into problems and knew last spring that they couldn’t do it for $93.7 million. They just blew through the original ceiling. Where was the contract oversight?”…

The Obama administration was issuing regulations and changing policy regarding how the reform should be implemented late into this summer.Many required significant changes to the IT running Healthcare.gov, which kept contractors scrambling.

We’ll need congressional hearings to find out which regulations forced the IT team to scramble at the eleventh hour to rework the site, but this could be another example of the White House’s desire to hide the uglier parts of this boondoggle creating problems for the website architecture. Remember, it was only this past summer that HHS suddenly decided to eliminate income verification for subsidies for the first year. Applicants will be placed on the “honor system” in reporting their wages, which is basically an invitation to commit fraud — but which serves the end of making those subsidies nice and robust for anyone willing to lie, which encourages enrollment. Could be that they built the site with the income verification tech integrated and then had to tear it out quickly and haphazardly once HHS changed its mind, leading to bugs. Like I say, this is what congressional hearings are for.

Nancy Pelosi, by the way, thinks there’s no reason at all to delay ObamaCare if the exchanges are still a disaster come December, which also happens to be the deadline for enrollment if you want your coverage to begin in January. I’d be surprised if there’s a single manager anywhere in the insurance industry who agrees with her, given the Thunderdome-levels of chaos Glitchapalooza will be causing them next year if this persists much longer.

Update: Merry Christmas, Barack.

The federal health care exchange was built using 10-year-old technology that may require constant fixes and updates for the next six months and the eventual overhaul of the entire system, technology experts told USA TODAY…

Recent changes have made the exchanges easier to use, but they still require clearing the computer’s cache several times, stopping a pop-up blocker, talking to people via Web chat who suggest waiting until the server is not busy, opening links in new windows and clicking on every available possibility on a page in the hopes of not receiving an error message. With those changes, it took one hour to navigate the HealthCare.gov enrollment process Wednesday.

Those steps shouldn’t be necessary, experts said.

“I have never seen a website — in the last five years — require you to delete the cache in an effort to resolve errors,” said Dan Schuyler, a director at Leavitt Partners, a health care group by former Health and Human Services secretary Mike Leavitt. “This is a very early Web 1.0 type of fix.”

You’ll have to read the rest to find out how clearing your cache might actually cause newerrors.

Update: Icing on the cake from health-industry consultant Bob Laszewski, who says the system’s scarcely improved after another week of frantic HHS triage:

At the end of week two of the Obamacare launch, health plans were generally seeing no more enrollments per day then they saw in the first week.

As troubling, the backroom issues plaguing the connection between health insurers and the federal government had not been resolved and there is no indication from the feds when they will have these things cleared up.

My sense is that the feds, based upon the number of enrollments they have sent to the insurance companies, enrolled about 10,000 people in the first week (about 5,000 single and family contracts) and another 10,000 people in the second week in the 36 states using the federal exchange.

I guesstimated that the feds were up to 95,000 or so enrollments in my earlier post, less than 20 percent of HHS’s target for October. Laszewski thinks even that number is wildly optimistic. If he’s right and they’re only at 20,000 enrollments total, they’re at less than five percent of their goal.

Update: No one’s getting fired, huh?

The root cause of the problems was a pivotal decision by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services officials to act as systems integrator, the central coordinator for the entire program. Usually this role is reserved for the prime information technology contractor.

As a result, full testing of the site was delayed until four to six days before the fateful Oct. 1 launch of the health care exchanges, the individual said…

“Normally a system this size would need 4-6 months of testing and performance tuning, not 4-6 days,” the individual said.

The source said there were “ever-changing, conflicting and exceedingly late project directions. The actual system requirements for Oct. 1 were changing up until the week before,” the individual said.

How could they have done a worse job?

White House: The only accountability that matters to us is the kind that makes the ObamaCare system better, or something

POSTED AT 6:41 PM ON OCTOBER 17, 2013 BY ERIKA JOHNSEN

The other day, former Obama White House press secretary Robert Gibbs caused a stir when he more or less echoed some of the growing calls from Republicans for the administration to fix the website’s glitches already and then “fire some people who were in charge of making sure this thing was supposed to work.” After all, the administration assured us that three and a half years would constitute enough time for them to adequately organize and implement the predictably herculean task of putting the exchanges together, so either they have some people they really need to fire or they have a rather large political admission they need to make. Which one is it going to be, guys?

Trick question. This is the Obama administration, and the answer is obviously neither:

ED HENRY: Short of somebody being fired, what kind of accountability will there be? Specifically, I haven’t heard you asked about this company, two companies I think, GCI Federal and Quality Software Services. They got millions of dollars in federal contracts for the website, the data collection, etcetera, and when even Robert Gibbs is saying, It’s been botched, is there an investigation of this company? Is this company planning to turn over these millions of dollars in hard-earned taxpayer dollars, is the government going to get some of that money back?

JAY CARNEY: Questions about contracts related to this are ones that should be addressed to HHS and CMS. I don’t have that information. What I can tell you is the accountability the president seeks today is the accountability that comes from those who are working on implementation, working around the clock to assure that the consumer experience is improved and that the whole process of the implementation of the Affordable Care Act moves forward. And again, it’s important to remember that this is not, although there is a lot of focus on it, the Affordable Care Act, ObamaCare, is not just a website. The website is simply a portal into a virtual marketplace for an average of 50 health insurance plan options per state for Americans on the individual market who, many of whom have never had access to affordable quality health insurance in the past or at least not in the recent past. And getting all of that in place is the focus of the team, and that includes of course improving the consumer experience on the website.

ED HENRY: But nobody will be held accountable?

JAY CARNEY: Again, the accountability the president seeks right now is the accountability that comes from making the system better, improving the process for consumers, fixing the problems that have arisen, and making sure that millions of Americans for whom this program was created are getting the benefits that it provides.

So… that’s a no, then? Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t getting rid of the managers who so royally botched this thing — a.k.a., holding people accountable — and bringing in better project leadership a really great way to get the system back on track?

Alas, if only that little bit of rhetorical obfuscation had been the only way in which the administration sought to avoid accountability today; Allahpundit noted earlier that it looks an awful lot like ObamaCare has achieved less than 20 percent of the enrollment target for the month of October, but the administration would like us to know that, actually, they never even had enrollment targets. Riiiiight. Via Sarah Kliff at WaPo:

Update: Health and Human Services spokeswoman Joanne Peters emails: “The Administration has not set monthly enrollment targets. We are analyzing data about the uninsured, state plans for enrollment, and the experience of the state of Massachusetts which implemented a similar system. We continue to focus on reaching as many uninsured Americans as possible, based on experience on the ground. As it did in Massachusetts and Medicare Part D, enrollment takes time.”

Humiliation: Design firm yanks Healthcare.gov credit from its website

POSTED AT 6:01 PM ON OCTOBER 17, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

A fitting tribute to Obama and Sebelius, who helped wreck the Healthcare.gov site becausehiding stuff was more important to them than getting it to work properly.

Between this and the devastating USA Today piece calling for “total overhaul,” the official Hot Air pool on when O will announce he’s delaying ObamaCare is open for business. Having hundreds of thousands of people tearing their hair out in frustration at using his crappy site won’t shame him into pulling the plug, but the political embarrassment of his allies starting to back away from his big “achievement” might.

Visit the website of Michigan-based design firm Teal Media today and you’d never know designers there helped create HealthCare.gov, the troubled online portal for Obamacare.

Just a few days ago, the site looked very different. Teal Media’s homepage featured its work on Obamacare prominently, placing a link to the firm’s work on one of the most well-known websites in America front and center. Now that link, as well as the page devoted to Teal’s work on HealthCare.gov, have been removed…

Teal Media doesn’t seem interested in talking about its work on HealthCare.gov. A woman who answered the phone at the company’s headquarters immediately referred BuzzFeed to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) at the Department of Health And Human Services (HHS) before a single question was asked.

Per BuzzFeed, Teal Media was founded by a former Obama campaign staffer and serves lots of Democratic clients. This isn’t just a random business walking away from a car crash, in other words. This is his own team.

Meanwhile, back at HHS:

The Obamacare website, which launched October 1, deleted some users’ passwords, according to multiple call center representatives for the site.

Five call center agents told CNN on Wednesday that because of an upgrade to the beleaguered website, many passwords were deleted if they were created in the first week or so after the launch. More recently created user names and passwords don’t seem to have the same problems.

If the representatives have it right, some users will continue having trouble logging in, no matter how many times they try.

A few hours ago I tweeted out the question of when Obama will, now seemingly inevitably, announce that O-Care needs to be delayed for awhile as they work out the bugs. Lots of people replied “the evening before Veterans Day” or “the Wednesday before Thanksgiving,” but I think even that’s optimistic in terms of how much time he has left here to make a decision. If USA Today is right that the site’s facing at least six months of work, there’s no sense waiting until November to pull the plug. All that’ll achieve is another month of aggravation for his partners in the insurance industry as they try to sift through a pile of glitchy enrollments and lots of confusion and disappointment among the uninsured as they continue to try to enroll and wonder if they’ll have coverage next year. Any responsible administrator would look at this pile of flaming rubble and act soon to put out the fire. But then, a responsible administrator would never have built a site this mind-bogglingly bad and then rolled it out anyway on schedule despite its countless problems because he couldn’t bear to be politically embarrassed. So, yeah, “sometime around Thanksgiving” sounds about right. In the meantime, if you have any friends who are uninsured, you might want to give them a heads up that O’s preparing to pull the rug out from under them soon but hasn’t worked up the nerve to tell them yet.

Exit question: Who in the White House is going to play Sean Connery to Obama’s Harrison Ford?

Catharsis Ours

Thursday, October 17, 2013

How bad has the ObamaCare rollout been - try perhaps 20,000 enrolled after two whole weeks ! And to understand why this has been total failure , just drill down for the gory details.....

Sebelius: No, we are not starting the ObamaCare site from scratch, and no, I do not have time to testify before Congress

POSTED AT 5:31 PM ON OCTOBER 19, 2013 BY ERIKA JOHNSEN

Doctors prepare for Obamacare race to the bottom

POSTED AT 8:31 AM ON OCTOBER 19, 2013 BY JAZZ SHAW

Industry source tells NRO: WH may have to consider “unthinkable options” if website meltdown continues into November

POSTED AT 11:21 AM ON OCTOBER 18, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

Obamacare sites pirated copyrighted web scripts, British company plans to sue

Maryland exchange, model of Obamacare implementation, won’t be fixed until December

POSTED AT 10:01 PM ON OCTOBER 17, 2013 BY MARY KATHARINE HAM

Obama administration caught in blatant software piracy; script powering Healthcare.gov ripped off from UK company

Obamacare woes widen as insurers get wrong data

Former official: Admin refused to bring in outside help for ObamaCare website for fear GOP would subpoena them; Update: Ten-year-old technology? Update: No improvement in week two; Update: Wasn’t tested until days before launch?

POSTED AT 4:41 PM ON OCTOBER 17, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

White House: The only accountability that matters to us is the kind that makes the ObamaCare system better, or something

POSTED AT 6:41 PM ON OCTOBER 17, 2013 BY ERIKA JOHNSEN

Humiliation: Design firm yanks Healthcare.gov credit from its website

POSTED AT 6:01 PM ON OCTOBER 17, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

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Thursday, October 17, 2013

How bad has the ObamaCare rollout been - try perhaps 20,000 enrolled after two whole weeks ! And to understand why this has been total failure , just drill down for the gory details.....

Sebelius: No, we are not starting the ObamaCare site from scratch, and no, I do not have time to testify before Congress

POSTED AT 5:31 PM ON OCTOBER 19, 2013 BY ERIKA JOHNSEN

Doctors prepare for Obamacare race to the bottom

POSTED AT 8:31 AM ON OCTOBER 19, 2013 BY JAZZ SHAW

Industry source tells NRO: WH may have to consider “unthinkable options” if website meltdown continues into November

POSTED AT 11:21 AM ON OCTOBER 18, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

Obamacare sites pirated copyrighted web scripts, British company plans to sue

Maryland exchange, model of Obamacare implementation, won’t be fixed until December

POSTED AT 10:01 PM ON OCTOBER 17, 2013 BY MARY KATHARINE HAM

Obama administration caught in blatant software piracy; script powering Healthcare.gov ripped off from UK company

Obamacare woes widen as insurers get wrong data

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Former official: Admin refused to bring in outside help for ObamaCare website for fear GOP would subpoena them; Update: Ten-year-old technology? Update: No improvement in week two; Update: Wasn’t tested until days before launch?

POSTED AT 4:41 PM ON OCTOBER 17, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

White House: The only accountability that matters to us is the kind that makes the ObamaCare system better, or something

POSTED AT 6:41 PM ON OCTOBER 17, 2013 BY ERIKA JOHNSEN

Humiliation: Design firm yanks Healthcare.gov credit from its website

POSTED AT 6:01 PM ON OCTOBER 17, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

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