In the Washington Post’s editorial on the president’s comments on the weak rollout of the healthcare exchanges at Healthcare.gov, there’s one thing that they implied but I wish had said outright. The president is continuing to pretend to be an innocent bystander to the actions of his own administration.
Given his position and lack of involvement, Obama’s more like a guilty bystander.
And then there’s this, from one of the states “successfully” running its own exchange:
Isn’t the point to have people actually enroll with insurance companies for products offered? If that hasn’t happened yet, doesn’t that signal failure instead of success? And this in the second or third largest state in the country.
1-800-F1UCKYO indeed.
I’m not sure if it is the most frustrating and disappointing aspects about President Obama, but it certainly is in the top five — a seemingly character trait of his to lean away from taking the hit for something that has gone askew in his administration. Sometimes, even though he kind of admits there is a problem, he then quickly passes accountability and blame on to someone else.
How would that conduct, leadership survive in the private sector? Would many CEOs retain their jobs if they shrugged off low earnings, worker incompetence and the like, only stopping every once in a while, to assuage consumer confidence in their product or service, by simply saying, “Better days are ahead!” Well, that has been this president’s recipe for how his administration rolls along in dealing with economic malaise, middle east debacles and failed domestic policies. Then there is the stonewalling, dishonesty, and outright obstruction in delivering requested material to Congress for ongoing investigations into IRS, NSA, DOJ, F & F, Benghazi irregularities.
Consequently, invoking transparency, as a front end goal in Obama’s political campaigns, has become a joke — a cruel fabrication that even some in the press are inclined to agree with when concluding this is the most closed down, secretive administration. ever! This has resulted in government trust tracking downward, as more and more people feel we are going in the wrong direction.
I missed the new spin on this yesterday: The failure of the website is a good thing!
So, the problem wasn’t volume, it was that the site is broken, but the volume was a good thing, because then the broken site didn’t work the way it was supposed to work. Got that?
At least they go on to state that the problem was managerial. Paging Drew! Paging Drew! Your “I-told-you-sos” are ready at Customer Service!
I’ve suspected for a while the President is a clinical narcissist; his inability to negotiate effectively, tendency toward high-handed behavior and obvious anger and confusion when people insist on holding him responsible for his actions suggest self-preoccupation and inadequate theory of mind/empathy.
@Icepick
When they decided to use manage the project with in-house personnel, it was doomed. In the private sector, these disasters were common 10 – 15 years ago. @Drew is familiar with them because they can affect a company’s finances significantly.
The problem is not that they are unqualified to do the work. The problem is that they are unqualified to know that they are unqualified to do the work, and that is stunning.
The problem is that they are unqualified to know that they are unqualified to do the work, and that is stunning.
LOL, it’s funny because it’s true!
To anyone who has actually worked in government, none of this is a surprise:
This kind of mismanagement, incomptence, and bureaucratic sclerosis pretty much dooms any major integration project like this one. Coding for the system only began six months ago. What I don’t think most people appreciate is that this is normal in much of the Federal government.
Here is where I again get on my good government soap box. These problems aren’t unique to this administration, but this administration, along with all the others, and Congress, simply don’t care. Reforming the governement bureaucracy is incredibly important, but it’s one of those tasks that would carry high political costs and few benefits. There’s no money in it, either in terms of political donations or lucrative government contracts, and it is not a grand “program” to build a legacy on.
Read James Joyner’s post about his new job and trying to get a computer account. Just getting hired isn’t easy – for both of us it took a YEAR to get hired from the time the job was advertised to the time we actually started working. This is AFTER President Obama put in a couple of marginal reforms to speed part of the process.
Even the little stuff is difficult. I have a computer that stopped connecting to the network back in July. Still not fixed and the only thing that needs to be done is for someone to configure a router in my building but there is only one person on this installation that can do it.
I’ve only been doing this a year, but I can certainly see why so many of the old timers have given up and only do the minimum, clocking paychecks and waiting for retirment.
Fortunately, Andy, I’ve dodged that bullet although I did have an offer. I think I’ve mentioned it before: long, long ago I received a job offer to be an analyst with the CIA.
Andy, I wouldn’t have expected specs to be issued after the bid is awarded. I’m used to construction type specs, where either the design is created first and the design specs are what contractors bid on, or performance specs are issued where the government doesn’t care about the specific design, but it just wants a list of qualities and possibly veto over the architectural renderings. In any event, what does the contractor bid on here, if its not known what the contractor is going to do?
PD,
I honestly don’t know. I know just enough about defense acquisition to be dangerously ignorant. However, maybe you can find an answer in this helpful chart:
https://ilc.dau.mil/
And the fine print for that thing is black comedy:
“Defense acquisition is a complex process with many more activities than shown here and many concurrent activities that cannot be displayed on a two-dimensional chart.”
Andy, I don’t appear to be able to access that website, I’m getting an invalid certificate error. More dark comedy?
PD,
Definitely more black comedy.
If you google “integrated life cycle chart” you’ll get many hits from non-government sites.
OK, I found it here:
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2010/09/atl_wall_chart.jpg
If only the invasion of Iraq had this many bubbles . . .
debating whether consumers should be required to register and create password-protected accounts before they could shop for health plans.
I can’t understand why, for this system, the government would not allow people to browse at will. What could possibly be the point in making that process difficult?
Here is where I again get on my good government soap box. These problems aren’t unique to this administration, but this administration, along with all the others, and Congress, simply don’t care.
Why should they? Democratic voters believe that there should always be more and more government and government workers all the time. Republican voters are split between those that think there should be more government and government workers for THEIR favored projects and none at all for anything else, and those that seem to believe there shouldn’t be any government or governmental workers at all. These are rough caricatures, but they probably account of 80-90% of the voters for either party at present. Mitt Romney was probably a rare Republican who would even think about how to do things well, and see how that worked out.
What’s left is a very small set of people that actually care about this sort of thing, and usually those people put THIS, the idea of ‘good government’, far behind all their other priorities. There’s damned near no voting block for whom this matters.
The only way to get reform is to either (a) get lucky as Hell and elect a President who ran on other issues but cares about this and has the political will to do something about it (your chances of this happening are approximately the same as you have that your next fart will be a new Big Bang and create the Universe anew) or (b) wait until everything falls apart, and hope that whatever happens next includes good government. I can’t even think of the odds of that happening, but they’re far more remote than those in (a).
… “why, for this system, the government would not allow people to browse at will.”
Sticker shock. The cost of insurance on the exchanges is so high, people would not enroll, but the potential subsidies are high enough that they might if they knew what their personal out-of-pocket cost would be.
Perhaps the web model should have been hotels / air flights, where you can get an initial comparison of quotes “as low as $x,” but additional information tends to float the price upwards.
Perhaps the question is: Why does this system require verification of personal information to get a quote? Why care if I seek to price the cost of insurance for a twenty year old girl who smokes cigars and makes over a million dollars a year?
@PD Shaw
It is not unusual to hire a company to write the bid specifications, but you need to know that it is beyond your qualifications.