Got behind on the day, so What Mattered is a bit late, but better late than never, I hope. So: the press frenzy about the ACA isn't going to matter much, and I suspect Barack Obama's ACA fix won't matter either.
What does matter? Fixing the web site.
That's what I have. What do you think mattered this week?
Saturday, November 16, 2013
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I'd agree about the ACA. All the Obama-is-doomed-because-of-Katrina stuff we've been seeing also doesn't matter. Boehner used the press frenzy to obscure his announcement that there won't be a vote on immigration reform this year, that certainly matters. Also the judge stuff matters on the DC Court of Appeals.
ReplyDeleteAnd if I can take some time and whine, I feel like I was pretty mislead by the press during October when it comes to the website(s) now that the official numbers have come out. The impression that I got was that quite literally nobody anywhere could sign up on the federal system, and while it's been pretty bad, tens of thousands of people were able to actually do it, and about a million more have started the process. I was honestly kind of surprised by that, I really thought it would be like 18 people or something were actually able to sign up.
I'm not saying everything is working, just that all in all I think the coverage of this whole mess has been "disastrous" too.
One week of this kind of press coverage doesn't matter. Week after week of it does (not just health care, but gun control, Syria, IRS and Benghazi "scandals", the NSA, etc.). Such a general atmosphere of negativity can be self-perpetuating, so I'm not sure than even objectively good news on the ACA or the economy would fully reverse the trend.
ReplyDeleteIt's really hard to know where we are at the moment. I think healthcare.gov will ultimately work, in which case I agree that the current troubles won't matter, but there's a nontrivial chance that that's wrong -- either that they can't ever get the system to work as envisioned, or that it does work but further unintended consequences emerge, like the collapse of the employer-based insurance system that some on the right are now confidently predicting. Not to go all John Judis on this thing, but we shoudn't understate the setback it would represent if "Obamacare" became another shorthand term for failure and overreach, like "the Edsel" or "New Coke" or "Desert One" or "Katrina" or "Jimmy Carter" or "George W. Bush." You'd have a slogan that would be thrown back at any future reform effort, ending the argument as far as the right was concerned and spooking Democrats (as usual) into backing off. (The comparison to Katrina is misleading, I agree, but in a way I haven't seen anyone else point out: Katrina did not discredit the underlying policy of federal emergency response; if anything, it reminded people why we need that policy. A big Obamacare failure would be more like the Iraq invasion -- apparent proof that the goal itself, and the whole approach, were misconceived.)
ReplyDeleteSo, it's astonishing that we're at the mercy of some team of IT people someplace. The last time I can think of that so much of American policy was riding on one small team of specialists was probably at Desert One. And again, this case is arguably worse, because Desert One didn't discredit the basic concept of solving problems in the Middle East militarily. (Would that it had.)
While I'm on this: as a citizen, I really would like to know how they botched the web site so badly. I mean, I can easily understand that the whole project turned out to be more complicated than they expected. But how do you go live with a site that doesn't work? How does Obama, or Sebelius, or at least the head of CMS not sit down in front of a computer on about Sept. 15 or 20 (at the latest) and say, "OK guys, now show me this thing WORKING"? I would really like to know who was the highest official who can claim to have witnessed a successful (or any) Alpha- and Beta-test of the system before 10/1. If we had a Congress worthy of a great nation (I know, I know.... I kid), it would investigate that question in a serious way, not to score points on either side but to find out how to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.
Exactly. This has really made me angry and upset at Obama. The right is always posting about how much time he spends on the golf course, and I have always thought, "Well, so what, GW spent a lot of time clearing brush on his ranch." But this was his signature accomplishment, and supposedly he asked how it was going, and no one told him? No one knew? It's mind-blowing as an example of his administration's level of insularity and dysfunction. And then he made some statement about how he'd fix it, but he's not a coder--as if, were he a coder, he'd be some super-duper coder that could do what others apparently can't. That just further shows how little he understood about the scope of this undertaking. (And for the record, I am a "coder" and have some idea of what the back-end issues consist of.)
DeletePlus, my right-wing family and friends are all over the supposed fact that a friend of Michele Obama's works at CGI and that's why they got the contract. I have seen no response to this from the left or from the administration. For example,
Deletehttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2477403/Michelle-Os-Princeton-classmate-exec-company-built-Obamacare-website.html
I've seen that right-wing "meme" about Michele Obama's friend as well. At first I thought they weren't bothering with it because it's just a nothingburger: some executive at CGI Federal is (a) black and (b) happened to be at Princeton at the same time as Michele, but even the initial reports on the right didn't point to any evidence that they had so much as had a cup of coffee together. Now, though, I see that Cruz, Issa and other GOP honchos have been tweeting this story around:
Deletehttp://dailycaller.com/2013/10/28/cgi-federal-executive-spent-christmas-with-the-obamas/
It could still be a nothinburger; I'm guessing that "Christmas with the Obamas" is a more or less formal event where lots and lots people get versions of those same posed photos. Still, at this point, I'd almost prefer to think we were dealing with old-fashioned cronyism -- it would at least make some sense of what otherwise is just a baffling screwup.
According to Clay Johnson and Harper Reed, it's not unusual. They say that 94% of large government technology projects over the past 10 years were unsuccessful, and 41.4% failed completely.
Deletehttp://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/25/opinion/getting-to-the-bottom-of-healthcaregovs-flop.html
So the administration certainly should have been watchful. Yet the potential problems they were watching for apparently weren't the ones that happened. The other day Congress released internal e-mails from last July showing administration officials complaining about ongoing problems with the development of the website. But it turns out that they decided that that part of the website was nonessential and simply turned it off, so those e-mails and those particular problems are unrelated to the fiasco of October. They need a major overhaul of how these projects are done.
As for the Michelle Obama scandal, I think it's up to the Daily Caller to establish that first ladies determine large government procurement decisions.
They could put in an extension where people who have completed an application by the deadline have some additional time to complete purchase of the coverage. Then at least they'll know how many people are signing up.
DeleteThe real problem, of course, is that you have a sizable number of people whose existing insurance policies are expiring or being terminated at a time when the website is unavailable to find replacements. Understandably, that adds to the panic. As longwalk points out, a sizable number of people did manage to get through, and a lot of people are probably just waiting until the website is fixed before they try or are still pondering which policy to choose. (Someone who used the New York website said there were something like 120 options to choose from, just at the bronze level. On the other hand, much of Alabama and Mississippi has Blue Cross and that's it; I wonder if functioning exchanges will eventually convince more companies to go there.) Nevertheless, they are going to need much larger numbers, and soon, just to make up for the people losing their old policies at the end of the year.
ReplyDeleteI suspect reporters are being lazy in reporting the policy-termination scandal. (Perhaps that's not a surprise.) First, a certain number of people always lost their policies at the end of the year, and they weren't offered alternatives as they are now. Now, all the terminations are being attributed to Obamacare, even though, as I understand it, those terminations were allowed but not required this year. You notice, Obama did not need to ask Congress to change the law in order to allow insurance companies to extend their existing coverage for a year. It's only after December 31 that they have to offer the new coverage, and next year's policies will be sold before that. Also, insurance companies are offering their terminated customers expensive "comparable" Obamacare-compliant polices that may not be the only options available. Here again, having a fully functioning website would be a vital component to making sure you're getting the best new policy for your needs.
For all those people out there complaining about the government determining their options, I'd like to point out that my employer-provided options are being reduced to one insurance company this year, which I guess puts me at the equivalent of Alabama-Mississippi Obamacare (in fact, it's the same company). Yet, somehow a lot of people seem to think we're only really free if our insurance options are shaped by insurance company executives and the HR office.
My mistake, it's not the same company, but that doesn't matter.
DeleteDo you suppose Obama believes he needs the insurance companies on his side right now, and that's why he's not calling them out on what may be some fast dealings with policy terminations?
DeleteI work with people with autism, and one of the common symptoms is what researchers call "rigid and repetitive behavior." Basically these behaviors look like OCD. I have a client who is displaying very disruptive rigid behavior, so I ended up going back to the research recently to see what experts say about it. Since researchers still can't figure out physiological or neurological causes of autism, the theories about autism symptoms are completely based on observations and theories. One theory was that people with autism create patterns and routines because they don't understand the world around them. Creating a routine might comfort and relax people with autism when they're forced to interact with a world that doesn't make sense to them.
ReplyDeleteWhat struck me about that theory is how applicable it is to all of us. We all create little patterns for ourselves. And that theory might explain traditional punditry... they're confused by politics and by the changes going on in the world around them. So they try and create patterns to help them feel more comfortable, and to relieve the feelings of uncertainty they feel.
So pundits have reduced social awareness and understanding, and this is why they explain things poorly? I think your description does work well to explain Richard Cohen.....
DeleteI have some empathy for Obama. I have never gotten a new computer or a new program for an old one that I haven't screwed up royally on the first roll-out. I'm just happy several million people weren't watching!
ReplyDeleteWasn't there a monster hurricane in Asia? Or was that so last week?
ReplyDeleteI'm watching the climate talks where the monster storm does matter, especially in motivating the non-wealthy countries who see clearly that they're already being hammered by the climate crisis, and the national wealth divide is getting sharper. Impact on the bigger climate talks next year increasingly likely.
ReplyDelete