Heeeeeeere's Obamacare!

[Fudbucker]

I am in no way contesting the fact that you believe the site is safe, and that you have acted in accordance with that belief.

On the other hand, I don't really see how your belief is relevant to the question of whether or not the site is actually safe.


It's not a fire risk until it's actually on fire. It's not a safety risk until someone actually falls to their death. It's not a health risk until someone actually gets food poisoning. It's not a security risk until it actually gets hacked.

I don't need a bullet in my gut to tell me that firearms are risky.

Hundreds of thousands of people have enrolled now (or completed applications at least). Is there any evidence to support your assertion out of those hundreds of thousands?

 

[DDWW]

Has anyone made a future prediction as yet for the million dollar challenge?

I predict that in the near future; Thousands of personal records hacked from Affordable Healthcare sign up website! :

DDWW

 

[Unabogie]

Has anyone made a future prediction as yet for the million dollar challenge?

I predict that in the near future; Thousands of personal records hacked from Affordable Healthcare sign up website! :

DDWW

What's the "near future"? And what do you give up if you're wrong?

 

[MattusMaximus]

People have been attempting to set fire to Healthcare.gov since Oct. 1. The fact that nobody has managed to do so is a good sign that security isn't as poor as many are claiming.

Yup.

The GOP talking points will continue, however.

It's almost as if they want the ACA to fail

 

[AlBell]

Has anyone made a future prediction as yet for the million dollar challenge?

I predict that in the near future; Thousands of personal records hacked from Affordable Healthcare sign up website! :

DDWW

tv talking heads have mentioned you must push a button stating you have no expectation of privacy using the ACA website.

 

[Unabogie]

tv talking heads have mentioned you must push a button stating you have no expectation of privacy using the ACA website.

Lie.

 

[AlaskaBushPilot]

Rasmussen reporting a staggering 81% of Americans want Obamacare repealed or changed:

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/healthcare/december_2013/81_favor_repealing_or_changing_health_care_law

This is before the public has grasped the full extent of the problems. There has STILL been no end-to-end testing of the system. The public, with their health on the line, is being used as the guinea pigs to see whether those who think they have "enrolled" are actually going to be covered by insurance. Most have no idea what their premiums, deductibles, and co-pays are actually going to be.

While the enrollment part of the site is not working, the "working" part of the site has "estimates" of premiums that it admits do not apply to you and does not show copays or deductibles anyway. It's too incredible to believe when ehealthinsurance.com can show hundreds of policies along with the actual premiums, deductibles and copays 24/7. Obamacare has only FOUR plans.

We are witnessing something historic. Breathtaking, and not in a good way, that the administration continues to bury its head in the sand and work on message management instead of acknowledging reality. Likewise for Obama's non-constitutional knee-jerk reactions.

They have abandoned the Spanish language part of the site. The SHOP portion of the site that was supposed to be up and running for small businesses. The back end portions of the system that have not even STARTED being developed.

The programming effort seems to have been focused on merely allowing more people to be on the site at the same time as opposed to actually WORKING end-to-end.

The administration is refusing to address congress on the security issues that were raised by experts in the industry at hearings so we have cheerleaders here who are demanding to see evidence when the administration is refusing to allow anyone to see! The most transparent administration in history, that is.

I loathe the republican party every bit as much as the democratic party. I belong to no party. These are not republican talking points. This is an ordinary citizen looking with disbelief upon a historic train wreck of ghastly dimensions. The real wreck has yet to begin but I think the upshot is that we are going to see congress and the president in a historic show-down at the Obamacare Corral.

 

[Silly Green Monkey]

Change the requirements just before an inflexible deadline to increase the demands on the site by orders of magnitude, and expect a flawless rollout? methinks you be smokin

 

[Virus]

Low Information Leadership,

For four years I have been told, by those who’ve worked in the administration and those who’ve visited it as volunteers or contractors, that the Obama White House isn’t organized. It’s just full of chatter. Meetings don’t begin on time, there’s no agenda, the list of those invited seems to expand and contract at somebody’s whim. There is a tendency to speak of how a problem will look and how its appearance should be handled, as opposed to what the problem is and should be done about it. People speak airily, without point. They scroll down, see a call that has to be returned, pop out and then in again.

It does not sound like a professional operation. And this is both typical of White Houses and yet on some level extreme. People have always had meetings to arrange meetings, but the lack of focus, the lack of point, the sense that they are operating within accepted levels of incoherence—this all sounds, actually, peculiar.

And when you apply this to the ObamaCare debacle, suddenly it seems to make sense. The White House is so unformed and chaotic that they probably didn’t ignore the problem, they probably held a million meetings on it. People probably said things like, “We’re experiencing some technological challenges but we’re sure we’ll be up by October,” and other people said, “Yes, it’s important we launch strong,” and others said, “The Republicans will have a field day if we’re not.” And then everyone went to their next meeting. And no one did anything. And the president went off and made speeches.

Because the doing isn’t that important, the talking is.

Ouch.

 

[remirol]

Rasmussen reporting a staggering 81% of Americans want Obamacare repealed or changed:

Rasmussen is a right-wing mouthpiece with zero credibility left after the 2008 and 2012 elections, where they failed in spectacular fashion (but won me quite a few bets against people who believed their numbers; Thanks Scott! Keep usin' those 1980s polling methods!).

Given the problems associated with the law, a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 50% of Likely U.S. Voters believe Congress and the president should repeal it and start again from the beginning

Given Rasmussen's known Republican tilt (proven in 2008, 2010, and 2012), that works out to about 45% -- or the equivalent of everyone who voted Republican in 2012. It'll actually be a mix of mostly Republicans, some Independents, and a few Democrats. No surprises here.

I loathe the republican party every bit as much as the democratic party. I belong to no party. These are not republican talking points.

I believe that you are not Republican; however, those are republican talking points. This is nowhere near as bad as you think it is, and if everyone involved on both sides would put a little "American Ingenuity" into it, it could be fixed with a reasonable amount of effort. Instead, the Republicans (having failed to attack the law) are now attempting to attack the implementation -- anything to deny Obama a success, rather than try to work on something that might be, you know, good for the American people.

The website was completely botched, I agree. That's primarily on the company hired to do the coding, and also on Sebelius for not standing over them with a pitchfork and making sure they were hitting all intermediate targets. At one point I heard 'waterfall' used to describe the development process that was in-use by this company, which if true is just moronic, and certainly explains why nobody knew what was happening day-to-day. However, this is the sort of thing we get when we as citizens throw hissy fits if government doesn't contract to the lowest bidder.

When the problem is with the website, you fix the website, you don't repeal the law. The law has far too many positives to even consider repeal at this point; why do you think the Congressional Republicans went into hysterics in October and embarrassed themselves nationally by making threats they didn't have the balls to follow through on?

 

[AlaskaBushPilot]

Rasmussen is a right-wing mouthpiece with zero credibility left after the 2008 and 2012 elections, where they failed in spectacular fashion (but won me quite a few bets against people who believed their numbers; Thanks Scott! Keep usin' those 1980s polling methods!).

Zero? I'm an econometrician and among other things what I do is survey. By all means explain to me how this incredible 81% figure is so far out of line as to have zero credibility.

I notice you did not offer any other competing poll showing how happy everyone was. That's what we do in statistical science - offer competing estimates and compare methodology to determine bias instead of poisoning the well, attacking the messenger, and other illegitimate means of argumentation.

I believe that you are not Republican; however, those are republican talking points.

This is what I detest so much with you partisans - both democratic and republican alike. The only thing important to you is not whether something is true or false but framing every god damned thing as either "republican" or "democratic", as if facts cannot be checked and logic applied.

This is nowhere near as bad as you think it is, and if everyone involved on both sides

There you go again. The world is only democrats vs republicans. Nobody else exists and there aren't even facts that can be measured scientifically. If a republican sees the thermometer at 50 degrees, it cannot be 50 degrees because a republican said it.

would put a little "American Ingenuity" into it, it could be fixed with a reasonable amount of effort.

What a vacuous statement! All we need is a little "ingenuity"? Intenuity is not going to stop a mathematical certainty regarding the idiocy of expecting young healthy people to pay for insurance they don't need.

Instead, the Republicans (having failed to attack the law) are now attempting to attack the implementation -- anything to deny Obama a success, rather than try to work on something that might be, you know, good for the American people.

You have no other way of seeing the world and keep pretending I give a damn about republicans. **** the republicans. Get it?

When the problem is with the website, you fix the website, you don't repeal the law. The law has far too many positives to even consider repeal at this point; why do you think the Congressional Republicans went into hysterics in October and embarrassed themselves nationally by making threats they didn't have the balls to follow through on?

You are in an increasingly small minority of people who are deluding themselves, and clearly it is your misguided world view of all things being Democratic vs Republican framing and the abject incapacity to see facts independent of that framing.

 

[remirol]

Zero? I'm an econometrician and among other things what I do is survey. By all means explain to me how this incredible 81% figure is so far out of line as to have zero credibility.

It was in the message, in case you missed it -- because we've seen Rasmussen's results in the past, AND we know that Scott Rasmussen is a huge Republican sympathizer, AND we know that Rasmussen's polling methods are out of date and that contributes to the Republican lean of his surveys, AND we know that combining "repeal" figures and "change" figures in the manner you did is intellectually dishonest, since the two courses of action would be markedly different.

This is what I detest so much with you partisans - both democratic and republican alike. The only thing important to you is not whether something is true or false but framing every god damned thing as either "republican" or "democratic", as if facts cannot be checked and logic applied.

I snipped out the rest of your strawmen because your entire post seems to operate under you making mistaken assumptions about me and then trying to berate me for them. I don't waste time on people like you. Please, continue to rant and Chicken-Little freely, though, even though your original premise was shown to be spun data from a faulty source.

 

[barehl]

Er, uh, yeah, I'll get back to you with the CPU cache register contents asap, mmmkay?

Clearly you are a fan of Southpark. However, registers are not associated with cache.

 

[AlBell]

It was in the message, in case you missed it -- because we've seen Rasmussen's results in the past, AND we know that Scott Rasmussen is a huge Republican sympathizer, AND we know that Rasmussen's polling methods are out of date and that contributes to the Republican lean of his surveys, AND we know that combining "repeal" figures and "change" figures in the manner you did is intellectually dishonest, since the two courses of action would be markedly different.

You appear to have forgotten the cites that demonstrate that.

I don't quibble with some of it but numbers would help your assertions.

 

[remirol]

You appear to have forgotten the cites that demonstrate that.

Memory starting to go, Al?

You can go back through all the pre- and post-election threads from 2012 and find all the evidence you need for that one. In case you missed it, poll accuracy was a major talking point for a certain party who then lost their asses and had a meltdown on live TV about it. Turns out their OWN polls were "skewed". If you look back through RCP's poll history, you can find one consistent outlier showing Romney as a + candidate -- Rasmussen Reports. That's only one source -- there was a specific thread about it here on JREF, in fact, with Rasmussen's name in the title, where plenty of evidence was presented prior to the 2012 election as to why Rasmussen's polling regularly leans Republican and can't be trusted.

So, we can take ABP's claim of "81%", follow the link and split it out to its component parts to see that 50% are being reported by Rasmussen as "repeal", knock some of their known lean off to get 45% (they missed by 4.9), and realize that it's very likely that this is just every Romney-voter obediently standing in formation shouting "repeal",... though many of them actually approve of a significant portion of the ACA if you ask them about it without saying "Obamacare", which they are Pavlovian-trained to froth when they hear. I even was generous about it -- I figure that "repeal" brigade is composed of a good chunk of Independents and a few Democrats, too. But the "repeal" brigade is a broken record at this point and not worth listening to as there is no possibility of repeal.

I have far more interest in what the "fix" brigade has to say, quite frankly; in the people who are proposing actual solutions that aren't just thinly-disguised versions of "repeal and replace with nothing". I note that there's another thread for that, so I'll decline to drift any further off-topic. Ideally we would look at the complicated pile of interchanges that the ACA has set up, realize that it's a bunch of implementation pain in the ass that's not worth it, and move to single-payer immediately. That's gonna take some time, though.

 

[barehl]

My claim was that it is likely that there are security issues with the site. I know quite a bit about Internet security and web development. The one thing we can be sure of with the healthcare.gov rollout is that the development team was incompetent. Not a bit off, but amazingly, astoundingly, incredibly, almost unbelievably incompetent.

Others might not be familiar with the Theory of Irrational Outcomes. Essentially this holds that two influences can cancel each other. So, if a website is really bad then you need a really incompetent team to fix it. So, the fact that the website had initial problems shows that the team didn't do everything right, but (according to the theory) the fact that it got fixed so quickly shows that the team must be even more incompetent.

Can you name any major web rollout in the last 20 years that has fared so badly on basic functionality?

If I had been living in a cave in Tibet then perhaps not. Backers spent $70 million building the Boo.com website software and it was nearly non-functional when it launched in 1999. Microsoft Live! Search was also nearly non-functional in 2008. Just in 2011 alone, there were spectacular crashes at the London Olympic ticket site, Target, Apple Store, Bank of America, and the Disney Store.

In any case, the rollout has been embarrassingly bad. This fact suggests that it's pretty darn likely that they haven't really crossed their T's or dotted their I's as far as security. This is what we call evidence.

Actually, this is what we call repetition. And, oddly enough, the number of repetitions is completely independent of the chances of its being accurate.

 

[DDWW]

From Drudge this morning, referencing CNN, Senator Harry Reid has exempted some of his staff from Obamacare.

All animals are created equal....just some are more equal than others.

DD (and it just gets better and better) WW

 

[Unabogie]

From Drudge this morning, referencing CNN, Senator Harry Reid has exempted some of his staff from Obamacare.

All animals are created equal....just some are more equal than others.

DD (and it just gets better and better) WW

You left out any links, which makes me wonder if Drudge is simply lying again.

 

[Upchurch]

From Drudge this morning, referencing CNN, Senator Harry Reid has exempted some of his staff from Obamacare.

All animals are created equal....just some are more equal than others.

DD (and it just gets better and better) WW

Don't congressional staffers already have employee health insurance policies? Why would they need to use the exchanges?

 

[Kestrel]

Don't congressional staffers already have employee health insurance policies? Why would they need to use the exchanges?

A special rule in the ACA requires Members of Congress and their staff to choose their health insurance plan from the exchange.

But that hasn't stopped right wingers from repeating the lie that Congress is exempt from the ACA.