Republicans Sabotaged Obamacare Rollout, then point to problems as proof the ACA is a failure.
October 21, 2013

 
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Everywhere I turned yesterday on the Sunday talk shows, some Right Winger was pointing to the botched rollout of the Federal “Health Care Exchange” website as evidence “Obamacare” was a failure. As both a former website developer AND small-business owner, I take great umbrage to the idea that if the website is a “failure” that the company is also a failure (unless the company in questions builds websites.) Let’s get one thing perfectly clear: A WEBSITE IS NOT “OBAMACARE”. Just because the signup website buckled under the strain of immense interest, does not mean “The Affordable Care Act” isn’t working. And the Federal Exchange website wouldn’t have been so wildly overloaded had it not been for 26 states with either Republican governors or Republican controlled legislatures refusing to create a state Exchange, thus forcing half the country to use the Federal website. That’s like shooting a guy in the foot and then ridiculing his inability to dance. In states like Virginia (correction) Kentucky and California where they created a state Exchange like they were supposed to, the system worked perfectly, signing up literally thousands of applicants. You can’t sabotage the Exchange and then call it a failure when it fails.

As I said, I’m a computer guy. I got my first computer long before IBM ever dreamed up the PC and Microsoft was selling software for the Apple ][ in ziplock bags via magazine ads. So you might say I know a thing or two about computers.

We’ve all heard about “computer attacks” from “hackers” shutting down entire computer systems (the most recent and well known is a group called “Anonymous”). One of the “easiest” ways to shutdown a website is via a “Denial of Service” attack. This is achieved by accessing a particular website hundreds (even thousands) of times per second until the host computer crashes, unable to handle so many hits at once. Have you ever poured water down a funnel too fast only to have it overflow and make a mess? That’s what happened to the Exchange website last week.

Now, let it be known that the Federal Exchange was NOT the victim of a DoS attack (that is easy to figure out just by checking the logs), but the identical thing happened legitimately when millions of people all hit the Federal site in the span of just a few days. And why were so many people all trying to access the website at once? Because of all those red states that left its residents with nowhere else to go.

It is incredibly stupid to say, “I hate Obamacare so much I’m going to give up any power I have to control how it is implemented in my state!” And you have to extra dumb… I mean Tea Party dumb… to tell the government that you’re turning down free money from the government both to create a state Exchange at no cost to the state, AND turn down millions in Federal Medicaid funding, all because you stubbornly oppose something you clearly don’t even understand.

After the rollout debacle, I spent about a week debating Right-Wingers on Facebook actually advising people to “not sign up for Obamacare and it’ll collapse under its own weight.” I pointed out 1) “Obamacare” is not “an insurance program” that you sign up for, and 2) I question the logic of telling people that having “NO” insurance is better than even (what they believe to be) “overpriced” insurance. And naturally, after much debate, it was clear NONE of these critics had actually gone on the Exchange to compare prices and find cheaper insurance (of course, the bungled rollout made that impossible… but the fact remains, they hadn’t even tried and therefore had no proof that insurance purchased via the Exchange would be more expensive.) And after several days of correcting nonsense, my sparring partners were STILL talking about “Obamacare” as if it were an “insurance program” that they were going to be forced “by law” to sign up for. Another was telling me how she got better deals by negotiating with her doctor to pay “over time in cash”. Try doing that when your hospital stays runs into the hundreds of thousands. And of course, the old Romney chestnut that “no one in this country lacks health care as long as we have ER’s” (the most costly care there is, which drives up everyone’s rates covering the uninsured, while providing no “maintenance” care like “chemo”, “check-ups” or “dialysis”.) It was as futile as sweeping back the rolling tide. Conservatism is a bottomless pit of stupid from which wisdom neither enters nor escapes.

And yes, sites like “Facebook” and “YouTube” handle “millions of visitors per day. But they didn’t on DAY ONE. They started out small and added capacity as their popularity grew over months and years. Opening “Healthcare.gov” was like launching “Facebook” or “YouTube” at their current level of popularity without knowing you were doing so. And as someone who has built large websites, arguments that “they should have known what to expect” make me very uncomfortable. It doesn’t matter how prepared you think you are, you never are once those hits start rolling in.

I was one of the Beta testers for “Windows 7” before it was released. We tested it for nearly a year through four or five rewrites seeking out bugs before it was finally declared “bug-free”. And yet Microsoft still had to release a “Service Pack” to patch numerous security holes less than a year after its launch. Trust me, it doesn’t matter how prepared you think you are, after millions of people get their hands on your work, someone’s going to break it. There’s an old saying in the computer biz:

It doesn’t matter how foolproof you make something, someone always comes along and builds a better fool.”

So in the coming weeks (not months), the government contractors that were wildly overpaid to build Healthcare.gov will be fixing their own work. I don’t know if the Canadian company that built the site will be paid even more to fix it, but one thing is for sure, it wouldn’t have needed fixing if we had 50 state Exchanges instead of just 24.
 

(Postscript: I predicted three weeks ago that the true goal of the Republican Shutdown was to set up President Obama for impeachment, and Gohmert’s like Rep. Louie Gohmert seemed to confirm what I had been saying all along, but in the end, there were just enough sane Moderate Republicans left to side with a united Democratic caucus to avoid default for another 90 days. But keep in mind that on the very last day, 144 Republicans voted against raising the Debt Ceiling and allowing the nation to default, which would have sparked world-wide economic disaster, thwarting what I believe were the Teanut’s intentions all along… impeaching Obama in an election year the way they did Clinton in ’98. But it’s not over yet. There’s still February.)

UPDATE: New Jersey Congressman Frank Pallone (D) blasted the Republicans chairing a hearing on problems with the website rollout, accusing them of fear-mongering by suggesting the site was collecting sensitive medical history information from applicants:
 

 


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October 21, 2013 · Admin Mugsy · 5 Comments - Add
Posted in: Economy, fake scandals, General, Healthcare, myth busting, Partisanship, Politics, Right-Wing Insanity

5 Responses

  1. Ebon - October 21, 2013

    I honestly think they’re hellbent on impeaching Obama for something, anything they can find.

  2. Grant in Texas - October 22, 2013

    The health care reform law calls for Medicaid to be opened to anyone earning up to 133 percent of poverty, which is about $15,300 for a single person this year. But the right-wing Supreme Court ruled that states may opt out, and about half have done so, as you noted, those states ruled by Republicans.  Sure, Roberts found the ACA as “legal” but also seemed to ensure it would have all of these problems.From Huffington: The Obama administration aims to sign up 7 million people for private insurance via the exchanges. This enormous task, challenging under ideal circumstances, is made more difficult by the decisions of many states — mostly Republican-led and including nearly the entire South — to resist the law’s implementation. As a result, the reach of Obamacare’s enrollment drive is expected to vary widely. Fewer uninsured people are expected to get coverage in places like Virginia, which is doing next to nothing to help its residents sign up, than in places like the District of Columbia, which embraced the law’s goals. And that’s not even factoring in the faulty federal website impeding the project in more than 30 states..

  3. Admin Mugsy - October 22, 2013

    Thanks for the correction re: Virgina. Actually, it’s *West* Virgina that has an Exchange. I substituted “Kentucky” in the post.

  4. Admin Mugsy - October 27, 2013

    It appears Salon.com came to the same conclusion as me, but added a few more examples of sabotage:

    http://www.salon.com/2013/10/26/gop_shares_blame_for_obamacare_glitches/

    They point out how the Republican Battle Cry has been “the states can do it better!”, but when given a chance to create their own health care exchanges, 26 Red states left it up to the Federal Government.

    I wish I had said that.

  5. Grant in Texas - November 15, 2013

    It does appear that the REICH may be hacking into the government’s webpage in order to ensure that the ACA will be a failure.  At a Congressional hearing this past week, Roberta Stempfley, acting assistant secretary of the Department of
    Homeland Security’s Office of Cyber-security and Communications, confirmed at least 16 attacks on the Affordable Care Act’s portal Healthcare.gov website in 2013.http://www.examiner.com/article/right-wing-cyber-attacks-on-healthcare-gov-website-confirmed?cid=db_articles

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