BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! As Obungler said at his presser last week, “Insurance is tough!”
Maybe he should have had insurance companies build healthcare.gov. Our banks. All those ATMs seem to work OK. Or Wall Street.
As a formally highly trained, highly paid, and highly motivated IT professional who was a sysprog with Big Blue, I am shocked at the epic fail of healthcare.gov. Did the people who built it know anything about IT projects? And it took them almost four years to fuck up in such a colossal fashion? We built the Hoover Dam in less time (and under budget) than it took these booger eatin’ moh-rons to come up with this fiasco. It took less time than it did to win WWII in Europe. From Pearl Harbor to VE Day took less time than this IT project. Give me six good large systems systems programmers and the hardware I need and within six months I would have the base back end system in place.
I’m a mainframe bigot so I would start with z/900 processors and I would run z/OS (MVS) in a parallel sysplex. Reliability, scalability, and serviceability. I would run DB/2 for the databases and CICS for the transaction processing. This is just the start.
Then before I loaded up the databases or set up the transaction processing, I would stress the systems. You gotta make sure that people, lots of people, can log on. You can write jobs to do that. Naturally, I would be running sumpin’ like Omegamon so I could monitor what’s going on and where the bottlenecks are. Ya gotta know that so you can set up the Workload Management policies. Of course I would be running VTAM with generic resources set up to handle the logons and other network stuff. This would take less than six months to do. Any more than six months means that you have lousy IT architects, lousy systems programmers, and lousy project managers. This stuff ain’t rocket science. Base – six months.
Then, it would be time to populate the databases and set up the transaction stuff. It would also be time to work on the connectivity issues with the insurance companies. This would be the complicated stuff because you would have to determine which insurance companies would be in the exchanges for each state. Of course this would be much easier if the Dimocrats had adopted the Republicans’ proposed policy of allowing insurance companies to sell their products across state lines, but since the Dimocrats didn’t allow any Republican input into this abortion that didn’t happen. You want competition? That would help. I’m gonna be generous and say this would take a year. Since this is a gummint project, things would be changing constantly. So, let’s add another three months. The rest of the base – fifteen months.
The final stage of implementation would be building the website front end, which would be the easiest part of the entire project. One month.
Twenty-two months which leaves a whole bunch of time left for testing, changing, adding more capacity as needed, and tweaking and it would work a whole lot better than what we have now and it would have cost less. A lot less.
Of course, the easiest and most cost effective solution would be to repeal Obummercare and start over. When you add up Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, and Obummercare, it will pretty much bankrupt us within fifteen years. Remember, there is no Social Security Trust Fund. The politicians in both parties have spent it buying votes. There is no Medicare Trust Fund. The politicians in both parties have spent it buying votes. Bribing us with our own money. In the private sector, these crooks would be in prison. Obummercare will not decrease the deficit as Obumbler and the Dimocrats promised and anyone with half a brain, which leaves out Obeauzeau and the Dimocrats, knew. It will increase it. Drastically!
And what about that Medicaid bribe that many states fell for, and thankfully Georgia didn’t which has the liberals in Georgia crying about. The feds will pay 100% of the expansion for the first two years. Then, they’ll cut their support to 95%. Look for it to continue to drop which will put the states on the hook for more than they can afford. Suckers! Thank you Governor Deal for not falling for that scam!
All this nets out to what?
We’re doomed! Big time!
Ooooo Denny ..I love it when you talk dirty!!!
Yo, ease up Denny! You make this computer stuff sound logical. I have had the local computer dude in to replace my small office system, and we are certain he must speak Swahili. Or maybe that is what he does to bamboozle us?
And if the Public Service all thought and acted logically, half would be out of a job. So, like a swarm of bugs, they all work towards their self-preservation.
But I agree with you.
Maybe those of us who are of like mind need a lapel badge – I am quite content to be called a Grumpy Old Coot!
Cheers
The Social Security Trust Fund is one of my pet peeves. I heard an analogy: Suppose you want to save for retirement. So every Friday you get paid, and you immediately take $10 out of your salary and put it in a box. But on Wednesday you run out of cash, so you open the box, take the $10 out, and put in a piece of paper that says “I.O.U. $10”. That gets you through the week. When you finally retire, you’ve got a box full of I.O.U.’s. Good luck.
The Social Security Trust Fund is a file cabinet filled with Treasury securities. In other words, and I.O.U. from the government and to the government.
I’m with you right up to the website front end. That is gonna take a minimum of 4 months but if they were smart that should be been done in parallel but I will give you a month to integrate it.
Don – The website front end is the easiest part. All it really would be is an interface to the back end stuff. If built properly all you would really need is a green screen (3270) interface. The web front end just makes it prettier with point and click rather than the cursor to select menu items. One thing I did leave out. For the states that have elected to create exchanges on their own, they would need a similar setup but not the same capacity that the main site would have. Once again. This shit ain’t rocket science. It’s just a large IT project that cried out for a mainframe solution. But then, I’m a mainframe bigot who, when I was a large systems CE, worked at one of the largest IT sites in the country, McDonnell-Douglas Automation. When I became a systems programmer/instructor, I taught classes onsite at large IT sites like AT&T, Boeing (which now owns the remnants of MCAuto Automation), the baby bells, EDS, and the Social Security Administration. All of these were large mainframe accounts.
Yeah, it’s all the pretty stuff that takes the time. 😉
I will not comply. Period.
Goddam!!! I’m glad you didn’t write this post in such detail a year ago…. Fuckin’ nsa might have (or other somesuch / nonesuch gummint outfit) put it in front of the golfer in chief. Looks like you know your stuff, Den. Too bad they couldn’t have hired you to get the system up and running, and give you an opportunity to trojan – horse the fuck out of it…. oh wait….. they did that … all on their own. You -know – what- them and the great unwashed horse they rode in on…
They wouldn’t have hired me for the following reasons:
1. The mainframe is dead, dontcha know. IBM is still making money selling mainframes and has no competition because it has driven everyone out of the mainframe business. It happened when they went from bi-polar to CMOS. It’s still one of the best solutions for large IT enterprises. Over 99% reliability. Scalable. Secure. Easy to maintain.
2. I’m not a liberal Dimocrat and I have no connections to the White House. I didn’t go to Princeton and have Moochelle as a classmate like the VP of the company that won the no bid contract to create Healthcare.gov. Remember how the Dimocrats would foam at the mouth over the no bid contracts that Halliburton got when Chimpy McHalliburton Bushitler was president? Me too.
Herman Kahn defined the phrase “trained to capacity” as the inability to solve simple problems that would have given no trouble had one not taken graduate training.
Seems appropriate.
The Dems didn’t care about republican input or the computer system or anything else that would have helped it function.They wanted single payer and were hoping for just enough success to make it hard to go back to where we were before Obama got his health care reform.
Great rant. One quibble, though: Although Hoover Dam was completed ahead of schedule, it was not completed under budget. The construction costs overran the budget by about 11%.
I obviously didn’t remember the over budget stuff when I watched the Hoover Dam program on the Discovery or History Channel.
This article claims ahead of schedule and under budget.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/building-of-hoover-dam-begins
Thanks Frank. I guess my memory was intact and it did come in under budget.
Guess what Coca-Cola is going to do? Get rid of the mainframe (I still say good luck with that) and put everything on an x86 platform…. Aint that a hoot??
About 15 years ago a bank in the UK made the same decision. It worked so well that the VP in charge of IT got fired.
Even if you did it, it still would have cost $650 mil. Lets see, $900K for you to buy computer time, pay staff, buy dependent software. $649.1 mil to kick back to politicians, the DNC, procurement people. After all it is a government project. Only difference was, your’s most likely would have worked if the bureaucrats wouldnt make changes everyday up to the last day.
I went out in the yard today and scanned the sky. There are usually several carrion eating birds overhead scanning for dead animals in my area. Bald eagles nest and summer here. Ravens live here most, if not all year round. Turkey buzzards have been known to visit on rare occasion. There is a county gravel pit down the road where the county road crews dump all of the roadkill deer and range cattle that run afoul of passenger cars and logging trucks using the state highways in this area. We always have big black birds in the sky over the pit. Today, nothing. I bumped into the local wildlife agent and asked him if he knew where the birds had gone. He said that he had heard that about a week ago they all picked up and flew East. Said they were headed back east to feast on the carcass of Obamacare. They instinctively knew that it would be dead by the time they got there. He was not kidding!