O Tempora!

Obamacare’s web site, healthcare.gov, was rolled out on October 1, 2013. It was an immediate disaster. The utter failure of the web portal is only part of the catastrophe. (More about that is available here: http://aropmeto.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-failure-of-healthcaregov.html). The real calamity is the program itself – the devastating effect it is having on health care in this country.

This program consists of two laws: The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act. Together these comprise 961 pages of legalese. In addition, there are approximately 10,535 pages in the 109 additional regulations created by unelected bureaucrats.

This program is already reaping an ill harvest. Many people who were happy with their actually affordable health care plans are losing them, because Obamacare imposes a certain set of features that these plans lack. Many medical plans are dropping doctors. The Prevaricator-in-Chief has told us repeatedly that we’ll be allowed to keep our plans and doctors if we like them. (Cue the Knickerbockers: "Lies!") Obama’s administration knew in 2010 that 93 million Americans would lose their plans. The Bystander-in-Chief may not have known about this, since he doesn’t seem to be actually in charge of anything he’s in charge of.

Those who actually were able to register on healthcare.gov have often found that new Obamacare-approved plans cost much more than what they had before. They are also finding that their deductibles will be very high. The new plans have a one-size-fits-all template. For example, any plan that doesn’t offer family planning or maternity care – even if the would-be client is a man, or is a woman in her 60s – is verboten by Obamacare.

Obamacare is a Government with Guns Ponzi (GGPS) scheme, like Social Security and Medicare. Obamacare robs younger, healthier people to subsidize older, sicker people. It ignores all laws of economics, and is hence driving health care costs higher and will probably end with fewer people having health care coverage than did before this web of deceit, privacy theft and power-grabbing was passed by a partisan congress.

Obamacare is to health care what healthcare.gov is to software development: a disaster.

There is a solution to this train wreck. It’s called free market medicine. In a free market, suppliers of a good or service compete with each other, spurring innovation and lower prices.

Unfortunately, even before Obamacare, there was no free market in most of medicine. About 60% of the money spent on medical care comes from government programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, Tricare and the VA, per Wikipedia. These programs subsidize the prices paid by the recipients. Therefore, the real costs have to be made up by those who do not receive care via these entitlement programs. Also, the artificially low prices paid by those on government programs increase demand. Medical care entitlement is one of the most significant factors in rising costs.

Some of medicine is relatively free-market. Laser eye surgery, for example, isn’t covered by “entitlements” or most health plans. People have to pay for this kind of procedure themselves. Therefore, this field is very competitive. The cost has gone down from thousands of dollars to hundreds of dollars, and the process has become easier on patients.

All medical care should be provided by the free market. That is the only way to keep costs down and to ensure that people get what they need. 

The Obamacare web software rolled out on October 1^st was about the worst flop the world has ever seen. This software was supposed to handle millions of requests to handle registration for President Obama’s signature legislation. It continually crashed, or said it was busy or gave other error messages. Finally, the Obama administration had to admit that the software had “glitches”.

Was anybody surprised by this bomb? I wasn’t. I spent 40 years in developing software, teaching computer science and providing software support. My career includes two stints as a US government employee and two positions with government contractors. I’ve also worked on integrating old software and databases with new software.

The Obamacare web interface and supporting software were supposed to connect to a variety of other software, such as software at CMS (Medicare contractor), IRS, DHS, VA, SSA and even Experian. This isn’t easy, especially if some of the other software was not designed to connect to other applications.

Actual coding of this monstrosity began in the spring of 2013, per the New York Times. That’s because the government took nearly three years to provide specifications for the software. As late as September, features were still being changed. End-to-end testing was done only at the last minute, according to this article in the Washington Post. And testing failed miserably just before the launch date, as CBS reported. Also, there were data data security problems, per NPR.

Any private-enterprise web site that was experiencing such problems would have come clean and announced a delay in the launch. But the government practices political computer science, not real computer science. I saw this first-hand when I was a government worker. So the Obama administration crossed its collectivist fingers, apparently expecting a miracle to occur, and announced healthcare.gov was ready. It WASN’T.

After about two weeks of utter disaster, the administration admitted that there were “glitches” and that these would be fixed by November 30^th. I’d believe them if they had said “November 30, 2014”. You can’t fix a gigantic software system as broken as this one in six weeks. If they’re lucky, it might be more-or-less bug-free in six months.

Of course, once the software is fixed, we’ll still be stuck with Obamacare, the dumbest idea since Medicare. For more on this, see http://aropmeto.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-disaster-of-obamacare.html.