Whether you love the PPACA or despise it, there’s an article over at the New York Times on the development of the Healthcare.gov web site that you should read. It recounts the project’s rocky history and many roadbumps encountered along the way including excessive complexity, inability to specify functionality until very late in the project, unrealistic expectations, and unworkable delivery dates. I laughed out loud when I read this:

One person familiar with the system’s development said that the project was now roughly 70 percent of the way toward operating properly, but that predictions varied on when the remaining 30 percent would be done. “I’ve heard as little as two weeks or as much as a couple of months,” that person said. Others warned that the fixes themselves were creating new problems, and said that the full extent of the problems might not be known because so many consumers had been stymied at the first step in the application process.

It’s obvious the Times’s reporters aren’t familiar with the 90-90 rule. If that estimate is correct, it could be years before the site is actually working.

I genuinely sympathize with the Administration on this. It’s a sad state of affairs when you can’t admit problems, can’t admit even the smallest error, and can’t even do the right thing due to the political considerations. That may be fine when running a political campaign but in project planning it can be disastrous. Large scale projects have enough inherent problems.

Check out The Onion’s Guide To Understanding The Debt Ceiling Crisis. Here’s a snippet:

What happens if the government defaults on its debt?

The United States will lose the credibility and respect we incorrectly assume other nations still hold toward us.

It’s almost too true to be funny.

The Chicago Tribune has a simple prescription:

Here’s how it worked: In 2011, Congress authorized an increase in the debt ceiling in exchange for $2.4 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade. The total included $1.2 trillion in specific spending cuts, and another $1.2 trillion to be identified later in 2011 by a bipartisan, bicameral group of lawmakers known as the “Supercommittee.” When the Supercommittee failed to make a deal, across-the-board cuts in the growth of spending occurred.

But that consequence — call it Sequester 1.0 — hasn’t proved painful enough to prompt Democrats and Republicans to lay down their arms and end these constant budget battles.

We’d like to see that same approach again: Raise the debt ceiling to avoid a default, but force a debt fix within, say, three months or face a much more dramatic haircut to each party’s sacred cows. But a Sequester 2.0 would have to really hurt: Don’t again reduce the growth of spending. This time, reduce spending.

That is, raise the ante in order to force action on reducing accumulated debt that does confront the America as we know it with an existential threat. Forcing both parties, both branches of government, to put more chips on the table would be a responsible way to get results from a president and Congress that already are gambling with America’s future.

Our problems are actually simpler than that. We need to decrease defense spending. We need to decrease healthcare spending. Simple to say, hard to do.

While many Americans are distracted by the melodrama surrounding the rollout of the healthcare exchanges, the real story is that healthcare spending is rising, continuing to increase, is unaffordable, and the PPACA doesn’t do a lot about it.

Total U. S. healthcare spending was $2.5 trillion in 2009. In 2012 it had risen to $3 trillion—an increase of 20% in just three years. That’s during a period of very low inflation.

However you want to rationalize it, whether in terms of total real healthcare spending or total real per capita healthcare spending, healthcare spending is increasing at an unacceptably fast rate. That’s killing state and local governments and stunting job growth.

After a measly twenty-five years of service our old Kenmore dryer has given up the ghost. The other night we smelled a burning smell coming from it. As befits a daughter of a family of firefighters my wife immediately disconnected it from the outlet. We then checked it for heat. Nothing was apparent. When we moved it away from the wall we noticed an oil leak.

Our equally old Kenmore washing machine has been limping along at a minimally acceptable level of functionality for years (if you want hot water, you’ve got to run it in with a hose). So we’ve decided to replace both our washer and dryer.

Yesterday and the day before we researched the subject both in our old issues of Consumer Reports and online and did a bit of online shopping. My wife went to Abt, our appliance store of choice, on Thursday and I went there yesterday. Now we’ve bought a new washer and dryer which will be delivered and installed on Thursday.

Our new washer and dryer are feature-laden and heavy on electronics which does not particularly comfort me. They’re more expensive than my first car and I’m resigned to the reality that they will not be nearly as reliable or durable as our old ones were. I’ll install some sort of power conditioning to protect the most fragile parts of the gadgets, unquestionably the electronic circuit boards.

Scott Carpenter, the second man to orbit the earth, has died:

M. Scott Carpenter, a college dropout and local ne’er-do-well who became the second American to orbit Earth, wasn’t proud of the way his teen years took off.

“The local papers that say I was just a normal boy are trying to think of something not bad to say,” he told Life magazine in May 1962, a few days before his historic flight in the Aurora 7 space capsule that made him the second American to orbit Earth. “I didn’t study hard and I quit high school football because I couldn’t devote myself to learning the plays. I stole things from stores and I was just drifting through, sort of a no-good.”

After twice flunking out of the University of Colorado and getting into a serious accident driving home from a party, he had an epiphany in his hospital bed. He returned to college and studied hard. Three years later, he was a Navy pilot. A decade afterward, he was one of America’s seven original Project Mercury astronauts.

Briefly feared lost after orbiting Earth three times and plunging into the Atlantic far from his target, he returned to parades and plaudits.

Carpenter, who in 1965 made history again with his experiments in an undersea research capsule, died Thursday morning at a Denver hospice, said his wife, Patty Carpenter, after having a stroke about three weeks ago. He was 88.

His passing leaves John Glenn as the last surviving Mercury astronaut.

The Daily Mail is reporting a story that should be some cause of concern. The enrollment for the health insurance exchanges under the PPACA has been quite small:

Just 51,000 people completed Obamacare applications during the first week the Healthcare.gov website was online, according to two sources inside the Department of Health and Human Services who gave MailOnline an exclusive look at the earliest enrollment numbers.

The career civil servants, who process data inside the agency, confirmed independently that just 6,200 Americans applied for health insurance through the problem-plagued website on October 1, the day it first opened to the public.

Neither HHS nor the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services would comment on the record about the numbers. Enroll America, the president’s organization of health care ‘navigators’ who are charged with helping Americans sign up, didn’t reply to a request for information about its level of success so far.

The White House also did not respond to emails seeking comment.

But several administration officials have claimed this month that they didn’t have access to the kinds of raw figures MailOnline obtained from the people who work for them. And the anemic totals suggest a far lower level of interest in coverage through the Affordable Care Act than the Obama administration has hoped to see.

That’s consistent with the results being reported anecdotally by the individual states.

The open enrollment period for the exchanges is six months. If enrollments continue at the present rate, the total enrollment, including for the state-run exchanges, would be roughly 2 million people.

My experience with open enrollments conducted by my clients is that they typically follow a pattern. There’s substantial inquiry and interest at first which simmers down to a much lower level and then there’s a final flurry of enrollments at the end. Pretty much as you might expect. All the more reason for a much smoother rollout than has actually been experienced.

Don’t confuse me with someone who wants the PPACA to fail. Quite the contrary. I want it to succeed to whatever degree it will succeed as quickly as possible so that we can recognize the scope of the problem and turn to addressing the problems with our healthcare system that are in such desperate need of resolution and which, sadly, the PPACA mostly just kicks down the road.

Perhaps the problems with the web site can be corrected by throwing hardware at it and bug resolution. That woud be a best case scenario. If the problems are more basic, resolving them while the site is up and running could be quite difficult. Imagine conducting brain surgery while the patient is playing a game of tennis.

Today would have been my Dad’s 99th birthday. I’ve posted a number of pictures of him in prior posts and it’s starting to become difficult to find good pictures of him I haven’t already posted—he generally preferred to be behind the camera rather than in front of it. The nude figure studies probably wouldn’t be the best choice. I don’t know that I’ll ever forget the expression on the face of a dear friend of ours when she stumbled across them, thumbing through one of our old photo albums.

I’m not entirely sure of the story behind this photo. I suspect he took it himself, probably trying out the timer feature on his camera. I would say he’s in his late twenties or early thirties here. His expression is a bit goofy. He had very poor vision and I can only speculate that he removed his glasses to avoid the reflection from the flash that would otherwise have been apparent.

I don’t know that I’ve really conveyed my Dad’s personality in my posts about him. One of his most notable characteristics was enthusiasm. He approached everything with enormous energy, drive, and joy.

He was an avid and skilled amateur photographer. He belonged to a photography club and was an early experimenter with color photography.

He was also what’s called an “early adopter” of technology. He was the first lawyer in St. Louis to use a dictaphone or xerography and not too many years before his death he was starting to write articles about technology in the practice of law.

I’m quite sure he would have been thrilled with digital photography and would have owned a top-of-the-line professional camera.

Writing at Fiscal Times, Eric Pianin and Josh Boak present three different ways the shutdown might end. They are

• Pass a stopgap measure that’s tied to budget talks.
• The President bends on the PPACA.
• Implement the Portman plan, a sort of “grand bargain” including a one-year continuing resolution, substantial entitlement cuts, tightening qualifications for subsidies under the PPACA, and tax code reform.

To me only the first of these sounds anything but far-fetched. This despite my impression that the best thing that could happen to the PPACA might be a brief delay. Any of these ways of ending the shutdown presumes that the two sides are actually interested in arriving at an agreement.

In a world in which everyone has their own facts and each side may believe that it’s winning that really doesn’t appear to be the case.