I am trying to not get sucked into political discussions on HN because, well, they are bad for you. There are a wide range of people on HN with different ideas. From the demographics derived from occasional polls quite a few of you are younger and less experienced in life and business. That's not a put-down, just a fact. There's also a layer of HN participant with obvious college-originated indoctrination that is hard to break through until something pulls them out of the cave [0]. And, of course, in general terms, arguing anything with a programmer can be incredibly frustrating --just ask my wife-- because the good ones instantly focus on corner cases, relevant or not, and will argue irrelevant minutiae to death.
So I won't critique ACA/Obamacae, the website or the development process. That's pointless. There are people who, just as in the case of various religions, will stick to their belief system no matter what anyone says. It is only when something external and utterly impossible to argue against presents itself that some of these people are willing to reason. So, none of that talk. It's pointless.
In thinking about this whole healthcare/website issue while kayaking (great way to unplug and just think) I came to the conclusion that what we are seeing unfold in front of us is of incredible value. In many ways, up until this ACA fiasco became front page news everywhere most US citizens dealt with government incompetence by simply ignoring it. It's one of those out-of-sight-out-of-mind deals. And, while most probably knew that ugly things have been happening behind closed doors and underneath each and every bill passed (regardless of party affiliation) most voters had better things to do than to stop their busy lives to go kayaking and critically think about these matters. Having solitude to just think is a rare commodity these days.
What the ACA has done in a major way is open the doors so we can all see the sausage being made. Plain and simple. We can see government incompetence in action. You don't have to be a programmer to recoil a the idea that a bad website that does not work cost taxpayers $600+ million dollars. And, you don't need a degree in computer science to probably guess that the final cost might reach double or triple that. And you don't need to even look at the code or know how it was written to start to understand that it is probably a complete mess and that three hundred million people are going to be forced to provide their most intimate data to this ill-conceived and ill-executed monster.
Let's not even discuss the tens of millions who are predicted to suffer significant collateral damage due to the the letter of the law and the intended or unintended consequences. I don't care who you are. Write a law consisting of 30,000 pages and an ever-expanding set of rules. Don't take years to debate, analyze, simulate and evolve it. Then go and try to implement it. Well, there's an absolute certainty of having huge problems.
Again, there's no partisan bend here. I am not arguing for or against the contents of the ACA. I am simply stating that something so massive that was created as the ACA ultimately was is almost guaranteed to be a minefield (or have one hidden inside somewhere).
Imagine writing 30,000 pages of code in your favorite language and not testing it until you release it to your customers. I know, I know, this isn't a perfect analogy. I am just using it to stress the point that something that large, without suitable testing and "quality control" is bound to be a mess.
Yet government operates this way. And we are the ones who get to eat what they cook-up. They certainly don't. Virtually nobody in the very top layers of this country's government has to live by a lot of the laws they pass. The Supreme Court certainly does not. Neither does congress or the office of the President. That should tell you something. They like to talk about the 1%, yet nobody talks about the 0.003%: The top 1,000 people in government who, to some extent, get to live above the law. The easiest way to have people not focus on you is to create focus elsewhere.
The ACA, from my admittedly Libertarian, perspective is great in that here we have something that irrefutably exposes how bad it is to put almost anything in the hands of government. This is not what you probably heard in school. This is not what you probably heard your professors proselytize to the captive audience of a classroom. To those who have never lived outside the security of government jobs or jobs where real-world consequences are, well, not real, their view of reality is vastly distorted from "real" reality. And that's what they spew out to our youngsters. And, because they are young and impressionable, they take it in and believe it. Very soon they are repeating the mantra without every having set foot in the real world.
Take this as an opportunity to watch and learn what reality looks like. If you are a reasonably accomplished coder you know, without a shred of a doubt, that $600 million dollars to implement the ACA portal --brilliantly or dismally-- is nothing else than obscene, if not criminal. A number in the range of one to, at worst, ten million (still sounds ridiculous) is what I hope most of you would think, no, would know, this should cost to do it right and to do it better.
Leave the details of the 30,000 pages and all of the collateral damage they will surely cause out of the equation. Just look at the sausage being made and form an opinion. Now realize this:
Everything. Absolutely everything in government. Is done. JUST. LIKE. THIS. You simply don't get to see it every day. Nobody reports on it. And it becomes water under the bridge. Now you can see it. Learn from it. Does this seem sensible to you?
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave