Sadly, the status report on Healthcare.gov from HHS doesn’t include a lot more information than is contained in article about it by Garance Franke-Ruta at The Atlantic. She sums up:

Federal officials said Sunday they had achieved their goal of making Healthcare.gov work smoothly for the vast majority of users.

“The site is now stable and operating at its intended capacity,” Jeffrey Zients said in a morning conference call with reporters that formally announced the achievement of a trio of goals.

As expected, Zients—the former health-care-management consultant and Office of Management and Budget official tasked with leading the website-repair effort—said the site would now be able to serve 50,000 users at the same time and had reduced error rates and page-load times to acceptable levels.

“The bottom line: Healthcare.gov on December 1st is night and day from where it was on October 1st,” Zients said.

To drive that point home, the Department of Health and Human Services released a report that detailed just how badly the site was functioning in October and early November.

The report concentrates heavily on inputs rather than outputs. From a technical standpoint the bottom line questions aren’t how many errors they’ve fixed but how many there are, concurrent users supported but end-to-end registrations to enrollments that can be processed per day.

The editors of the Washington Post say that Healthcare.gov still isn’t where it should have been on October 1:

Leading up to its weekend deadline to get the site working, Obama administration officials assured the public that the “vast majority of users” would be able to use it. To them, “vast majority” means 80 percent of users — which is still too low. Officials boast the site is able to handle 50,000 simultaneous users. Yet that was the goal for Oct. 1, a day on which five times that many tried to access the site at once.

Then there are less-visible issues. Officials admit they are still having trouble with the files that transfer enrollment information to insurers. Other parts of the site’s back end still aren’t built. It was right — but not encouraging — that the Obama administration extended the date by which people have to apply to get coverage that starts on Jan. 1. Even that, though, is risky: Insurers will have only eight days to work out the logistics of enrolling those signing up late this month.

let alone where it should be now. And, as I mentioned in a post earlier today, the almost 40% of Americans who don’t have a broadband connection at home will still need to choose among using a dial-up connection to access Healthcare.gov, almost certainly a nightmarish experience, signing up with one of the healthcare exchanges over the phone, or doing so manually.

I wonder what the latency, the time from initial application to completed enrollment, is for persons enrolling exclusively via paper and the mails.

I think there’s something that Megan McArdle doesn’t understand:

The administration didn’t force employers with a religious objection to offer contraception because it made financial or medical sense; they did it because it had great symbolic value to Barack Obama’s political base. And much of that symbolic value seems to actually come from the willingness to coerce people who object to buy the stuff. You can imagine that in an intra-left debate over what mandatory services should be covered, some of the people now professing outrage at Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. (one of the parties involved) would see the logic of ditching birth control if it lowered premiums by $15 a month and thereby increased access.

But, in fact, if you want to make the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act viable for the long term, you’re going to need the support of folks like Hobby Lobby as much as you need low premiums. There are many religious people in America, and if you want to keep stirring up active opposition to the law, one good way is to suggest that this law forces them to pay for something they are convinced is morally wrong. (Hobby Lobby’s objection is not to contraception in general, but specifically to products that could prevent a fertilized egg from implanting.) If you want to still be fighting Obamacare in the trenches 40 years from now, the best way I can think of is appending it to the argument over abortion.

which is that part of the problem with our political system today is that accomplishing something material doesn’t necessarily produce political gain but poking a stick in your opponent’s eye does. And it feels so good.

There is a hierarchy of values at work here. Having an issue is better than solving a problem. Hurting your poilitical opponent is better than reaching a mutually agreeable solution. Holding tough is better than compromise.

With that hierarchy in mind, it’s clear that appending Obamacare to the argument over abortion is a feature rather than a bug.

Who’s less likely to have a broadband Internet connection at home? According to Pew Research, people without broadband Internet connections at home are more likely to be women, members of minorities, have a family income of less than $30,000 per year, rural, or some combination of the above. They also tend to be older than people with broadband Internet connections.

Now imagine trying to use Healthcare.gov with a dial-up Internet connection.

Sounds to me like the profiles of the target Healthcare.gov user and the user without broadband are pretty similar.

It also seems to me that younger Internet users are more likely to access it via their phones than via personal computers. Just a thought.

The deadline the Obama Administration placed on itself for getting the Healthcare.gov web site on its feet has passed and, unsurprisingly, the administration is giving itself “a passing grade”:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said on Sunday that it had met its goal for improving HealthCare.gov so that the website now “will work smoothly for the vast majority of users.”

In effect, the administration gave itself a passing grade. Because of hundreds of software fixes and hardware upgrades in the past month, it said, the website — the main channel for people seeking to buy insurance under President Obama’s health care law — is now working more than 90 percent of the time, up from 40 percent during some weeks in October.

Jeffrey D. Zients, the Obama adviser leading the website repair effort, said consumers were having a much better experience now than in early October. Pages on the website load faster — in less than a second — compared with an average of eight seconds in late October, Mr. Zients said. “The site is now stable and operating at its intended capacity, with greatly improved performance,” he said.

In the end it won’t be how much effort has been put into the site, page load time, or user experience that determines the success or failure of Healthcare.gov or the healthcare insurance exchanges for which the web site is the primary portal. It will be how many people enroll in plans, their demographic makeup, and whether more people are helped than injured by the PPACA, and, ultimately, whether voters take their pleasure or displeasure to the polls. As I’ve been saying for some time, time will tell and now there’s a lot less of that than there was two months ago.

I was asked my opinion of what effect the incipient deal with Iran might have on the situation in Syria and I found that my thoughts went well beyond comment length so I decided to put them here.

Here’s how I would characterize the deal with Iran. It might be unfair. There’s nothing really binding in the deal, it’s unverifiable, and it’s unenforceable. In essence, it’s a joint press release. The Iranians receive an implicit acceptance of their “right to enrich”, they’ll continue to develop their Arak heavy water reactor which, coincidentally, produces plutonium which can be used to produce nuclear weapons, and receive a certain amount of money. The West receives a promise that Iran will reduce highly enriched uranium stocks of unknown quantity to LEU (which could later to re-enriched to HEU) and increased access by inspectors to sites that comprise an unknown proportion of their nuclear development along with the impression that there will be further talks down the road, something the Iranians vehemently deny.

What effect will that have on the situation in Syria? If you assume (as I do) that Israel will not attack Iran on its own, it gives the Iranians six months of breathing room during which they’ll have a largely free hand. That includes continuing to assist Assad in his putting down of the rebellion against him in which they’re already heavily involved.

What I think is more interesting is what effect the agreement with Assad has had on the Iranians. Consider the parallels. Both are reprehensible, repressive, illiberal regimes with one overwhelming imperative: regime survival. Assad gave up something not particularly important to him, his stock of chemical weapons or, at least some of his stock since we have no way of verifying how forthcoming he’s been, in exchange for avoiding the consequences of his use of checmical weapons (if, indeed, he did use chemical weapons) and ensuring his primary imperative: regime survival. And the Assad regime is putting down the rebellion against it:

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the army was shelling rebel positions that had halted its advance.

The army has “apparently decided to use overwhelming force,” Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said.

The advance into Nabuk comes a day after the army secured the nearby town of Deir Attiya, and follows its recapture of the strategic town of Qara, which led to thousands of refugees flooding into neighbouring Lebanon.

A Syrian security source said the army had only Nabuk, nearby Yabroud and a handful of surrounding villages left to capture before securing the Qalamoun region completely.

“If this town is captured, all we’ll have left is Yabroud and some other villages to completely block off the border with Lebanon and to stop any entrance or exit of rebels into Lebanon,” the source said.

“The next phase will be to retake the south (of Syria). The north and the east are for later,” he added, referring to areas under the control of the rebels or of Kurdish militia.

They clearly believe they’re winning:

(Reuters) – Prime Minister Wael Halki said on Saturday Syrian government forces were winning the war with rebels and would not rest while a single enemy fighter remained at large.

Maintaining Syria’s unyielding response to Western calls for President Bashar al-Assad to step aside, Halki said the era of “threats and intimidation has gone, never to return, while the era of victory and pride is being created now on Syrian soil”.

He was speaking during a visit to Iran, which has provided military support and billions of dollars in economic aid to Assad during a 2-1/2-year-old civil war which has killed 100,000 people and shows little sign of being halted by diplomacy.

The United Nations said on Monday that a long-delayed “Geneva 2” peace conference would go ahead on January 22. The government and the political opposition have both said they will attend, but rebel fighters on the ground have scorned the talks.

Assad, whose forces have consolidated their hold around Damascus and central Syria this year, faces little internal pressure to make concessions to his opponents as long as he maintains military momentum and Iranian support.

So, here’s the blueprint for dealing with the West that has emerged. The West is sufficiently desperate for a deal and gullible enough that you can offer something only peripherally related to your primary objective and that’s unverifiable. In return you have successfully stood down the combined power of the Western nations, something good for a certain amount of street cred in the Middle East, you can escape accountability for past infractions, and you can continue to pursue your primary objective. If Moammar Qaddaffi had followed that blueprint, he’d probably still be in charge of Libya today.

There’s an interesting and distressing article in the LA Times on the tenure of Roger Mahony as archbishop of the Los Angeles diocese of the Roman Catholic church, concentrating on the sexual abuse scandal that plagued the church during the time he was bishop and in which, frankly, he was complicit. Like most Catholics I find the whole subject unbearably distressing and I have found that while it has not shaken the faith of many Catholics it has shaken their trust in the organizational church.

Overall I found it a good and informative article but, sadly, the article furthers two of the errors of reporting that burden the issue. The first is that the incidence of sexual abuse among Catholic priests is no higher than among men, generally. That is not a defense. I think, in particular, that the response of the church hierarchy to the problem has been criminal. But I believe that the most likely explanation for the focus on sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests rather than, say, male teachers, doctors, or lawyers is anti-Catholicism. Additionally, the article uses an incorrect definition of pedophilia. More than 80% of the victims have been male and more than 75% have been pubescent or post-pubescent rather than pre-pubescent which would meet the definition.

My own remedy would be the same one adopted by Chicago’s Joseph Bernardin when the issues came to light: zero tolerance. Report the cases to the police, as is required by law in the schools. I also think that there should be more women in positions of influence and power in the church. Won’t ordain women? Fine. Put non-priests in positions of power and responsibility in the church. Anything else is sexism which has been condemned in papal encyclicals.

One of my persistent criticism of Americans is that for most of us our formal education in morals and ethics, if any, ended in primary school. Every thing else we picked up on the streets. Colby King’s latest column asserts the moral imperative of the PPACA:

Forty-nine million Americans do not have health insurance. For many of them, the ability to deal with their illnesses and injuries depends on their ability to pay. Lacking the money, some of them just go without the care they need. Better to put food on the table for the kids than to check out that awful pain in the gut. Can’t afford to do both.

[…]

Gaining access to no-cost preventive services to stay healthy, which Obamacare provides, is not a sign of indifference. Neither is giving senior citizens discounts on their prescription drugs, or allowing young adults to get health insurance on their parents’ plan, or ending insurance company abuses. Those steps represent the caring actions of government.

Sadly, the design, structure, and implementation of the PPACA undercuts his argument seriously.

The PPACA is a system for ensuring that more Americans have healthcare insurance. It neither guarantees that all Americans will have healthcare insurance nor does it provide that, having insurance, they will have access to healthcare, nor that the healthcare to which they have access will be effective. Mr. King draws too straight a line between insurance and care. While I agree that a society that denies care to a large chunk of its people has a serious moral problem, I don’t think there’s a similarly compelling moral argument for insurance.

Additionally, while there is a good moral argument for the rich subsidizing the healthcare of the poor, I don’t think there is a similarly compelling moral argument that the healthcare insurance of families of four with a family income of $82,425 should be subsized by families of four with a family incomes of $82,426. But that’s the way the PPACA is structured.

Finally, I don’t think that Mr. King takes his argument far enough. Who is worse, someone who argues against the PPACA on the grounds that its design and structure are inherently flawed or someone who argues for it, benefits from its enactment into law, and then drops the ball so that its execution is seriously if not fatally flawed?

If everything depends on one’s unknowable intentions, Mr. King needs to make his argument that those who opposed the PPACA intended to harm the poor. He doesn’t do that in his column.

I was disapointed in the Wall Street Journal’s profile of San Jose mayor Chuck Reed in that, despite its focus on the public pension problems faced by the “capitol of Silicon Valley”, the article didn’t mention any attempts on the part of the city to raise additional revenues. All of the measures mentioned in the article involve cutting costs rather than increasing revenues, e.g. reducing the number of police officers, requiring that public employees contribute more to their own pensions.

The answer might be that the city might raise rates but it is unable to increase revenues. San Jose depends most heavily on property taxes and retail sales taxes. In California, due to its Prop. 13 requirements, you can increase the tax rate on real estate but it might take some time for that actually to increase revenues. Sales tax revenues in San Jose have been flat since 2006 (in 2006 they were $140 million; in 2012 they were $141 million).

The county recently increased the sales tax by a half cent and a new tax has been imposed on “pot clubs”. Neither is expected to bring in a lot of revenue. It could make an interesting experiment on the price elasticity of marijuana. There’s a summary of San Jose’s fiscal picture here. Like most such official publications, it’s like a fan dancer’s fan—apparently revealing while actually concealing.

The Golden State apparently has problems similar to ours: it’s a lot easier to bestow benefits and services than it is to pay for them.