Step 1: Enact a hellaciously complicated healthcare insurance reform plan.
Step 2: Enact a plan with the “insider-outsider” problem noted in The Economist.
Step 3: Enact it strictly along partisan lines.
Step 4: Neglect the implementation of its entry portal until after a disastrous debut.
Step 5: Oversell it and give a mealy-mouthed apology for overselling it.
The president and the Democrats better hope that Peggy Noonan’s assessment is wrong:
A great deal is possible because the people are coming around to the Republican point of view on the program: They do not like it, do not trust it, do not believe it will make things better. The president got caught—and it’s amazing he did it, because he must have known he’d be caught when the program debuted—dissembling, for three years, as he sold and attempted to popularize his program. In fact if your insurance isn’t provided by an employer or the government, chances are pretty good you will soon lose your policy, your doctor, your premium price.
[…]
The mainstream press is already beginning to peel off. Bill Clinton gave them permission for that. Big Dawg was right: The president has to honor his own word and protect those who trusted him and been thrown off their plans. The press, and congressional Democrats, are no longer disloyal if they say the same thing.
Democrats in the House seem near to snapping, and you never know what the House will do. They’re elected every two years. They’re always in an election cycle, and are thus more reactive to and sensitive to shifts in public thinking.
It would make history if congressional Democrats proved to be serious, equal to the moment, if they pushed back against the White House and came through for the American people by moving, in a real move, not a cosmetic gesture—too late for that, that’s what they should have been doing a month ago!—against ObamaCare.
It’s honestly not clear to me whether getting Healthcare.gov mostly working by the end of the month is important or not. Oh, it not mostly working would be important. If you think the flailing around for solutions is desperate now, wait until then. I’m not even sure mostly working will help.
The sad reality is that once any computer program has reached a certain levevl of complexity it will inevitably have bugs. There may be no fixes, just trade-offs. The president’s political opponents will be able to trot out a continuing stream of horror stories, a torrent of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
What worries me is the dwindling elapsed time. How many end-to-end enrollments will the site support per hour? If your experts tell you there is no maximum number, get better experts. The closer we get to critical deadlines, e.g. the middle of December, the middle of February, the greater the demands that will be placed on the site and, inevitably, the more system failures.
Time to que Michael: “what, me worry?”
Except for those with an extra $3k/month, the exchange is the only way for the 5 million with cancelled policies to get coverage, and the website is the only way for them to purchase from the exchange.
On the website fixes, I suspect that most of the people working on it have little database knowledge. Apparently, SQL is too hard. If you do not know how to write a proper SQL statement, you pull all the data and work it locally.
Unless the code is totally re-written, it is going to be a tangled mess of nested If-Then statements.
” Enact it strictly along partisan lines.”
I’ve been thinking about this in terms of the rule of law and Stephen Douglas. (Cue for some of you to tune out)
In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln advocated containment of slavery and Douglas advocated popular sovereignty, in which each state choose whether to be free or slave upon entering the Union. Both approaches were subsequently repudiated by the Dred Scott decision. So, one of the questions of the debates was whither now? Stephen Douglas did not argue for changing any laws, he just articulated a description of reality. If the people of a territory are opposed to slavery, there will not be slavery, as regardless of the abstractions of the Supreme Court, slavery can only exist when local laws respect it, and if people vote for candidates who oppose slavery, then they will not enact the necessary local legislation necessary.
The allusion was clear to Southerners. The federal Fugitive Slave Laws had become increasingly dishonored by local police action. In particular, places like Massachusetts gave alleged escaped slaves a right to a jury trial before they could be returned to a claimant, and these resulted in jury nullification of federal law.
A more recent example is the REAL ID Act, which requires the states to upgrade driver’s licenses to a national standard that would aid in terrorism and immigration issues. Many states have not only refused to comply, they’ve passed legislation condemning the federal law.
The big question for the ACA is whether a law barely passed can reach full implementation without further assistance. The law quickly became unpopular, but not unpopular enough to repeal. Does it need more resources or changes from Congress. Does it need legislation from the States? Does it need the support of the Courts?
The law quickly became unpopular, but not unpopular enough to repeal.
Actually, PD, the HC law was unpopular before it’s passage, which is why the teaparty group was so quickly formed and activated, in the early part of 2010, going forward and being a formidable part of the republican wave dominating the end-of-the-year midterms.
I personally think changing a bill, so densely packed with stuff’, one which has generated a glob of rules and regulations nobody seems to fully understand, is fool hearty. IMO, what needs to be done is scrap the entire bill, extracting positive remnants from it, and incorporating those in a new, less comprehensive one.
Unless the code is totally re-written, it is going to be a tangled mess of nested If-Then statements.
What, they couldn’t work in some for loops?
@Icepick
If the architecture is as bad as I suspect, they will be using kludges to fix the parts that are causing problems. The If-Then’s are to handle exceptions that were not originally taken into account.
At some point nobody will understand the code enough to make major changes, and then, they will catch the exceptions as they arise. The fix will be local because nobody knows how it will impact the rest of the code.
The website code will be similar to the law it is being designed for – a tangled mess of unintended problems.
That’s part of the explanation for something I mentioned in an earlier post about overvaluing existing software. Complicated obscure software that nobody really understands (but they know it doesn’t work any other way, either) doesn’t have a lot of salvage value.