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Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the requirements stage

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Re: Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the requirements stage

#41

Post by tunesmith »

jamroom wrote: post #30
powertower wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is that for some people's coverage to be lowered, impoverished people to be covered, and pre-existing conditions paid for, a bunch of young and healthy individuals (without families) are now required to sign up for insurance. And the cost of that insurance for those healthy individuals is now 2-4x more expensive than it would have been before Obamacare took place (obviously the money has to come from…

Of course - that's the whole reason for the mandate. Similar to social security, there needs to be a pool of people paying into the system that are not using it. I don't agree with you that the plans will be worse though - maybe in some states, but certainly not here in Washington.

The Medical Loss Ratio part of the law also helps with that. Used to be that plans paid 75% - 80% of their premiums towards care. Now they're mandated to pay 85%, or 80% for individual plans.

The other thing to factor in is that most of the people that are experiencing premium increases are on plans that don't meet the "minimum level of care" as mandated by ACA. Those plans that no longer qualify are often the types of plans that lead to the horror stories of people being kicked off of plans after becoming sick (rescission), lifetime maximum amounts, etc. Insurance companies were saving a lot of money due to those brutal practices. Part of the intent of the ACA was to eradicate those practices, which ultimately protects the people that were subscribed to those plans, and who didn't understand they were at that type of risk.

In other words, if you were subscribing to a crap plan, your premiums were artificially low in the first place. It's kind of a degraded case of the people that are complaining that they can't any longer go insurance-free. The law of the land now is that everyone has to participate, in order to help take care of our sick and injured - so that means that our insurance plans all have to have a basic level of quality.

I would bet that if you restricted your search to the people that originally had plans that met that basic level of quality (which is really not all that high), you would find that their premiums have gone down.

(Obligatory data point: I'm self-employed in washington, have had a Regence BCBS plan for $540, and my monthly premium will go down about $150-$200 / month for similar care.)

Re: Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the requirements stage

#42

Post by joering2 »

jamroom wrote: post #21
powertower wrote: post #10

> In my case, even the most expensive plan for our family in the State of Maine, where we live, is half the cost of what we are currently paying, exclusive of any subsidies. The elephant in the room is that this is not the typical case - http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/09/25/double-...

Just want to add another data point, that here in Washington State, a comprehensive plan for my family is going to be around $600 less per month under Obamacare than what I can get right now. This is without any subsidies of any kind, so while I know it is just 1 extra data point, I consider myself a "typical case" (3 dependents, 1 pre-existing condition). I can say that the Manhattan institute's numbers (what the Fo…

> Just want to add another data point, that here in Washington State, a comprehensive plan for my family is going to be around $600 less per month under Obamacare than what I can get right now.

I get your point and I congratulate you. However, please don't be prematurely happy, "because $600 less" is not what will fix you -- the coverage itself will.

Let's hope that when you need that coverage, you won't be treated the same way as ObamaCare website right now is. You see, before you could complain to your health plan, make a big stink out of it, even sue them, because there were private entity. When to GOV takes over, all you can is pray. Go ahead make a big stink that their system is broken, but don't be surprised to get heavily audited, for example.

My point is that I would prefer to pay even $6000 more knowing I will get the quality of coverage I pay for. I would not want to pay less to be hit with bureaucracy, abuse, lack of transparency and fairness the way government will serve me like they did with their website.

Re: Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the requirements stage

#43

Post by 001sky »

chimeracoder wrote: post #17
powertower wrote: post #10

> In my case, even the most expensive plan for our family in the State of Maine, where we live, is half the cost of what we are currently paying, exclusive of any subsidies. The elephant in the room is that this is not the typical case - http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/09/25/double-...

> The elephant in the room is that this is not the typical case - http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/09/25/double-... . It still boggles my mind that people are surprised by this. Mathematically, including people with pre-existing conditions will mean either that those people are required to pay for the (expected, not actual) costs of their own care, or that other people will be required to pay for those…

It still boggles my mind that people are surprised by this. Mathematically, ...

Its an interesting social phenomenon, that large-scale opaque repricing of a commodity is met with opportunistic ~scalping. This happened accross europe during the conversion to the Euro. US consumers are probably rightly suprised.

Despite the expectations of economists that the euro change over would have no effect on prices, European consumers perceived the opposite. To shed some light on this puzzle, we develop a model of imperfect information in which cheaper goods experience higher price growth after the changeover. Retailers, aware of consumers’ difficulties in adopting the new currency, use currency changeovers to increase profits by in creasing prices. The lower the price transparency after the changeover, the higher the euro–related inflation. Using data on inflation (Eurostat) and price levels (Economist Intelligence Unit), we show that although the euro changeover did not significantly increase inflation, it nevertheless had distortionary effect on prices. {etc}

http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/dziuda/personal/...

Re: Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the requirements stage

#44

Post by lymie »

Retric wrote: post #32
sunraa wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per the NYT: "But the government was so slow in issuing specifications that the firm did not start writing software code until this spring, according to people familiar with the process." Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/us/politics/from-the-start... (October 12) And from today (Oct 21): http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/us/insurance-site-seen-nee... In a previous life I worked on similar software developmen…

You don't need 100% final requirements to start building the system. If nothing else start working though the interfaces with other systems, and try and get as close as possible to a working prototype. Granted funding is often an issue, but even a tiny team given a few months head start can get a lot done.

By airboat on a thumbdrive that gives you the PO box where you can retrieve the encrypted CD with password to website (the password is "cat" and its already in a hidden field if you view source) that tells you how to call their IT department in Bangladesh who will give you unclear and contradictory instructions on how to use the RSA dongle who's key changes every 3 seconds and is 47 characters long. (RSA stands for Ron, Stan, and Adam the guys who wrote the "Algorithm" that generates the key. Its actually just 3 strings of random gibberish that rotate. (Adam's cat got on the keyboard and they thought it would be a nifty way to get random numbers)) Even if you managed to type all 47 characters in 3 seconds it wouldn't work because the strings don't match what's on the production servers, only "Staging" which isn't really staging, its dev, and dev is staging.

Re: Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the requirements stage

#45

Post by betterunix »

Plasmoid wrote: post #38
Retric wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need 100% final requirements to start building the system. If nothing else start working though the interfaces with other systems, and try and get as close as possible to a working prototype. Granted funding is often an issue, but even a tiny team given a few months head start can get a lot done.

On government contracts that's actually a problem. You can't bill for any work you did without 'authorization'. Which means you can't do anything until a finalized spec, signed in triplicate, is physically delivered to you.

I have wondered for some time now if it is legal to develop tools and libraries that are relevant to an upcoming contract, but which are also general purpose and could be used elsewhere.

Re: Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the requirements stage

#46

Post by GVIrish »

joering2 wrote: post #42
jamroom wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just want to add another data point, that here in Washington State, a comprehensive plan for my family is going to be around $600 less per month under Obamacare than what I can get right now. This is without any subsidies of any kind, so while I know it is just 1 extra data point, I consider myself a "typical case" (3 dependents, 1 pre-existing condition). I can say that the Manhattan institute's numbers (what the Fo…

> Just want to add another data point, that here in Washington State, a comprehensive plan for my family is going to be around $600 less per month under Obamacare than what I can get right now. I get your point and I congratulate you. However, please don't be prematurely happy, "because $600 less" is not what will fix you -- the coverage itself will. Let's hope that when you need that coverage, you won't be treated t…

With ACA you're still getting insurance from a private company and you can still sue them if you like.

Re: Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the requirements stage

#47

Post by lightstrike72 »

jamroom wrote: post #21
powertower wrote: post #10

> In my case, even the most expensive plan for our family in the State of Maine, where we live, is half the cost of what we are currently paying, exclusive of any subsidies. The elephant in the room is that this is not the typical case - http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/09/25/double-...

Just want to add another data point, that here in Washington State, a comprehensive plan for my family is going to be around $600 less per month under Obamacare than what I can get right now. This is without any subsidies of any kind, so while I know it is just 1 extra data point, I consider myself a "typical case" (3 dependents, 1 pre-existing condition). I can say that the Manhattan institute's numbers (what the Fo…

Adding another anecdotal Washington state data point, my private individual health insurance plan (Regence Evolve HSA) with a premium of $149/month will no longer be available come January. The plan most similar to my current one is $252/month (Regence Direct Silver), which is a pretty massive increase. As a healthy, single 25-year old though, I knew some version of this was coming.

Re: Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the requirements stage

#48

Post by SeanLuke »

powertower wrote: post #10

> In my case, even the most expensive plan for our family in the State of Maine, where we live, is half the cost of what we are currently paying, exclusive of any subsidies. The elephant in the room is that this is not the typical case - http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/09/25/double-...

Citing Avik Roy does not help your claim. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/01/t...

Re: Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the requirements stage

#49

Post by EpicEng »

powertower wrote: post #31
chimeracoder wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The elephant in the room is that this is not the typical case - http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/09/25/double-... . It still boggles my mind that people are surprised by this. Mathematically, including people with pre-existing conditions will mean either that those people are required to pay for the (expected, not actual) costs of their own care, or that other people will be required to pay for those…

> It still boggles my mind that people are surprised by this... I was surprised because I was told that this new coverage affordability came from getting insurance companies greed in check. I didn't know that insurance companies were actually lobying for Obamacare, not against it. http://www.policymic.com/articles/62541/here-s-the-proof-oba...

Of course they are; this bill feeds them a guaranteed customer base. This is the largest issue I have with ObamaCare. The sole job of an insurance company is to assess risk. With a government mandated customer base there is no longer any risk to asses.

So... Why are the insurance companies involved at all? Why are they still in business? That's rhetorical, I know the answer, and I don't like it. We're all paying a middle man to do nothing for us.

Re: Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the requirements stage

#50

Post by joshdick »

gry wrote: post #5

Thoughtback [ https://thoughtback.com/ ] sent me a pertinent reminder this morning. No affiliation, just a great tool. Organizational metrics, which are not related to the code, can predict software failure-proneness with a precision and recall of 85 percent. This is a significantly higher precision than traditional metrics such as churn, complexity, or coverage that have been used until now to predict failure-pronen…

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler" -- esr
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