201–210 of 239 posts
It has a nice graphic that takes up two thirds of the page while giving no significant information.
What could possibly be wrong with that? That's what most modern landing pages are doing, after all.
Who is in-charge for healthcare.org? What company?
Reread the article, this is complete nonsense. The $634M number is 6 years of contracts, starting in 2008 (Obamacare was signed into law on March 23, 2010), which doesn't align with his claim that CGI Federal won the contract in 2011. The solicitation number he uses to filter the USASpending.gov site is also tied to a larger PECOS contract, and not to Healthcare.gov like he claims. We're being had guys. This is poor…
At what number do we stop saying this is hilariously large? Even if the actual cost was 1/10th of that, it's still 60 million.
A lot of people are complaining about the cost, even at the $60M-$100M, but I haven't seen anyone explain what costs would be reasonable for something at this scale and with the security + privacy requirements it likely entails.
This is what frustrates me about many of our non-USA HN'ers here: every time the state sponsored health care issue comes up, the non-USA folks can't wait to talk about how their country has it, or how it costs this little to get coverage for this or that problem in their country, and then they wonder why "you Americans" put up with the system you have currently in place (self-insured, no state plans - pre-Obamacare).…
This is a really good talking point, but the fact is the existing (mostly private) healthcare system is huge, expansive, riddled with inefficiencies, and is a disappointing product. Saying that the new government healthcare system is inefficient and disappointing is not enough to malign it - it has to be equally or more inefficient and ineffective than the system it's replacing.
Just because option A sucks doesn't mean we should prefer option B which we justifiably expect will be (and is rapidly proving to be) much worse.
Oh, BTW: my nontrivial experience with the existing (mostly private) healthcare system is that it works very well, thank you very much, now please keep your hands & laws off it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is very questionable whether a tax penalty is equivalent to "gun-to-the-head tactics". Speaking of a tax penalty: where did you get $3000 from? "The fee in 2014 is 1% of your yearly income or $95 per person for the year, whichever is higher. The fee increases every year. In 2016 it is 2.5% of income or $695 per person, whichever is higher." - from https://www.healthcare.gov/what-if-someone-doesnt-have-healt... Som…
Even if it's just $95, the point is the same: if you don't buy this product, you are fined and the police power of the state can be brought down upon your head if you don't pay up. Endless stories abound of people losing homes, savings frozen/confiscated, incarcerated, etc. over non-payment of seemingly trifling amounts. Heck, the whole Branch Davidian incident (50+ day standoff, dozens shot or burned to death) boile…
Little else to add, except that we might remember how the drafters of the 16th Amendment, which authorized the Federal income tax, decided not to cap it at 10%, fearing that would be a ceiling soon reached.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Been there, done that. Never again. Federal government consulting firms hire warm bodies at the lowest price possible. They are the people who employ the college students from Java shops (because a degree is a must, of course) who barely learn Java and then grow up to never touch another programming language in their life. Knowing anything from MS or Oracle is double plus good for your resume. You're totally rep…
Extra fun side notes: While holding a technical discussion about current tasking with a coworker in a "hallway meeting" our boss's boss and the gov-manager-who-signed-the-contract walked by. I was later reprimanded for chit chatting too much instead of working. Another issue, due to some contract specifics and my life situation I was able to decline healthcare coverage from my employer and I received that in salary c…
We had a government employee who was responsible for building our mess of a Java project (it was done by hand). It was error prone due to some self-referential build requirements, and the deployment of projects had to be done in a specific order. Generally a deploy took a couple tries.
While I was there I skunkworks-implemented Jenkins CI (nee Hudson at the time) to deflect constantly getting blamed for broken builds and down time when they occurred. The side effect of CI was that I had automated away this government employee's entire job and reason for being paid. One day that employee was out but we still needed to deploy, so in my naive excitement was like I've got it guys, watch this, pointed the deploy target at our live acceptance testing server, clicked the build button and ta-da, gov. employee wasn't needed and nothing was screwed up. Even better, it was completely deployed in a few minutes instead of several hours.
What do you think the result was?
The CI server VM got turned off.
This is what frustrates me about many of our non-USA HN'ers here: every time the state sponsored health care issue comes up, the non-USA folks can't wait to talk about how their country has it, or how it costs this little to get coverage for this or that problem in their country, and then they wonder why "you Americans" put up with the system you have currently in place (self-insured, no state plans - pre-Obamacare).…
This is a really good talking point, but the fact is the existing (mostly private) healthcare system is huge, expansive, riddled with inefficiencies, and is a disappointing product. Saying that the new government healthcare system is inefficient and disappointing is not enough to malign it - it has to be equally or more inefficient and ineffective than the system it's replacing.
This seems a little confusing to me. I'm using the site linked in one of the previous comments: http://usaspending.gov/explore?tab=By+Prime+Awardee&fiscal_y... This shows the $634M headline number as the amount of contracts paid to CGI Federal over a ~6 year period. It is filtered based on solicitation number HHSM500200700015I. A little googling returns the following page: https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode…
> Before we all explode in outrage, are we sure that we are reading the details of this correctly? > the ACA website cost only $93M What more details do we need? There's much worse going on at the same time than that ridiculous number. But it is totally sufficient in on it's own to be outraged.
Can you provide a more reasonable, informed cost estimate?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. This ruined some of my ambitions, but thank you for the warning and stories.
Please do not let this discourage you. The stories are, sadly, quite accurate depending on which company you work for (there are better situations than bodyshops) but we can't afford to give up. Dive in and help change things. This is a monumental challenge that requires more people that know a better way and are willing to act.
Just to not be a totally cynical asshole, I have heard NOAA is actually pretty modernized and efficient and everyone I've talked to seemed to be happy working there.
I'd also add that while the place I was at had its share of crap, the government for the most part loved our work because their previous contracting company had came in, wrote up a ton of requirements and specifications, sat around for two years and delivered nothing functional (and still got paid).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey spiffyman, reasonable points, but it really looks to me like josefresco is implying that the launch is getting unduly harsh treatment in the media, but maybe I misread it. Also, regarding the 20 million figure, here's the quote: Seven percent of Americans report that somebody in their household has tried to sign up for insurance through the health care exchanges, according to an AP-GfK poll. While that's a small…
"The CBS video also claims there have been only "a handful" of sign ups, and it's getting reported in lots of other places. It could be inaccurate, but these are mainstream outlets reporting this, not Breitbart or Drudge. " This. A Washington Post reporter talks to one random (and anonymous) insurance guy (with who knows what kind of political baggage) who gives them a single quote. They run with it, other news organ…
Even if there were several orders of magnitude more signups then are being reported, the numbers would still be a disaster, so I'm genuinely not sure what your point is.