Yes, Obamacare = vaporware

And here's what Megan McArdle had to say about the technical challenges in doing just the IT implementation of Obamacare:

I was drawing on my experience doing IT implementations. Six months is an extraordinarily aggressive timetable to start doing an IT project, even one that’s what one of my colleagues used to call “shake and bake”: take it out of the box, add a few of your own ingredients, and serve it up.

Yes, the administration had been working on Obamacare since it passed in spring of 2010. But it seemed to me that just the build phase would take longer than they were allowing, because Obamacare had a lot of complicated parts; it’s basically a giant Rube Goldberg machine that breaks if any of its major pieces goes even slightly awry.

As the law (and all the wonks) had described them, the exchanges needed real-time data from the IRS, in order to calculate whether purchasers were eligible for subsidies, and how big those subsidies should be. In order to determine subsidy eligibility, they also needed to know whether your employer had offered you health coverage costing no more than about 10% of your family income, as they were required to by law (and subject to a fine if they didn’t). Only those who couldn’t get affordable employer coverage were eligible to purchase subsidized insurance on the exchange.

That’s two sets of big, secure databases that needed to be hooked into just for the subsidy part. One of them had to be created from scratch, and it wasn’t clear to me that the IRS was ready to deliver real-time payroll data, either.

Then there was supposed to be some sort of hook into the state Medicaid systems, for those below 133% of the poverty line. There was also, of course, the part where insurers sell you insurance. That seems like an enormous project all by itself.

As if that wasn’t hard enough, most of the exchanges were being set up under federal procurement rules, which make it slow and ponderous to commission software and buy equipment. When I was working for banks and other financial firms, if the developers needed a bank of new servers for an important project, I could get that signed off and shipped within a week, two at the outside, as long as the powers-that-be really wanted it to happen. That just doesn’t fly in the government.

Note that McArdle is only talking about the complexity of the IT implementation. That is, she is stipulating that there is a clear mapping from the 2000 pages of the ACA to business processes and that these processes just need to be implemented in software. Well, my guess is that the ACA is probably incredibly vague on many points. Think for a moment about how much discussion there has been over the years on how to calculate fair value. Think for a moment about how much litigation there was around the question of whether bank foreclosures were processed fairly. There is an enormous potential for litigation if evidence emerges suggesting that the system implementation of Obamacare does not accurately reflect the wording and intent of the law.

Obamacare, the DMV, and complex systems, part 2 (or Obamacare = vaporware)

As a followup to my post from yesterday, I post what WSJ reported this morning:

The next big test is implementation of the exchanges, where people can shop for coverage on Oct. 1.
...
Last month, the Government Accountability Office said "several key tasks" for building the exchanges were still incomplete, which experts said were needed to finish computer systems.

"From a technology perspective there are too many complex things that need to be completed and there's not enough time," said Dan Schuyler, a director at the consulting firm Leavitt Partners and a former director of technology for Utah's health insurance exchange.

The exchanges have been compared with travel websites, which allow consumers to compare prices and buy tickets.

But health sites have a bigger task. They must determine whether buyers are eligible to participate and whether they qualify for a government subsidy.

The sites also must interact with dozens of insurance companies that are expected to offer plans through the exchanges—as well as connect with the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security to certify U.S. citizenship or legal residency.

Joanne Peters, of the Department of Health and Human Services, said the department was "on track" to open the exchanges as scheduled.

Compare this with the rosy picture painted by President Obama in his "technology" speech last week:

We recently re-launched an upgraded, easier HealthCare.gov. Beginning October 1st, Americans will be able to log on and comparison shop an array of private health insurance plans, side-by-side -- just like you go online and compare the best deal on cars or the best deal on computers. Because you’ll finally be part of a new pool with millions of other Americans, insurers will actually want to compete for your business. And we’ve worked really hard to make these marketplaces user-friendly. So, for example, when the prototype of an application to join the marketplace came in at 21 pages, we rejected it. We said let’s do better. It’s now three pages long. And, by the way, that’s a lot shorter than the application you have to fill out for private insurance currently.

I smell vaporware. Obama sounds to me like the CEO of a software company who knows nothing about the software development process, but has promised his customers a definite release date; he is going to end up with a lot of egg on his face when his engineering managers come to him and tell him that it's simply not possible to meet the goal.

Obamacare, the DMV, and complex systems

Consider the complex hardware and software systems that will be required to implement Obamacare.

If you think it is easy for governmental agencies to develop such complex systems even with the help of the most sophisticated systems houses, consider the experience of California when it tried to modernize its DMV systems with the help of HP. As reported by IEEE Spectrum:

Last week, on behalf of DMV's management, California’s CIO informed state legislators that it had decided to cancel at the end of January the remainder of its US $208 million, 6-year IT modernization project with Hewlett-Packard, which was supposed to be completed in May of this year. As reported in the LA Times, after spending some $134 million ($50 million on HP) and having “significant concerns with the lack of progress,” the DMV decided to call it quits and do a rethink of the program’s direction. HP had apparently seen the handwriting on the wall. Its contract ended last November, and HP refused to hire key staff until the contract was renegotiated.

The DMV IT modernization program was started in 2006 in the wake of a previous DMV project failure (called Info/California) that blew through $44 million between its start in 1987 and cancellation in 1994. That “hopeless failure,” as it was then described, was supposed to be a 5-year, $28 million effort; when it was terminated seven years in, the project’s cost to complete had skyrocketed to an estimated $201 million with an uncertain finish date. A 1994 LA Times story reported that an assessment found the DMV had limited experience in computer technology, grossly underestimated the project’s scope and size, and lacked consistent and sustained management.

The idea that all the computer systems required to implement Obamacare will be up and running smoothly by October is sheer fantasy. The recent announcements of delays in the implementation of Obamacare are just the beginning. Expect a steady drumbeat of additional postponements from the Obama administration as the implementation of Obamacare falls farther and farther behind schedule.

And, oh yeah. If the exchanges try to go on line in spite of poorly functioning systems, the complexity of the problem will only grow, since not only will the buggy systems still need to be fixed, but also the processing errors made by the buggy systems will subsequently have to be corrected, too.

Heavy-handed tactics in Egypt.

Bloomberg reports:

The administration has urged the Egyptian military to stop using heavy-handed tactics, according to two U.S. officials who asked not to be identified commenting on private communications.

In 2011 Obama told Mubarak "The transition must begin now." I guess that doesn't qualify as heavy-handed tactics.

Zimmerman versus Gosnell

Compare the news coverage of the George Zimmerman trial to the news coverage of the Kermit Gosnell trial.

No, there is no liberal bias in the main stream media.

Barack and Hillary: rank amateurs when it comes to the Middle East

Back in 2011, President Obama, Caesar-like, gave the thumbs down to Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, telling him: "The transition must begin now."

And then, after Mohamed Morsi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, assumed power, we heard only fawning praise of him from Obama's Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton:

"I want to thank President Morsi for his personal leadership to de-escalate the situation in Gaza and end the violence," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who met Morsi Thursday, said at a Cairo press conference with Egypt's foreign minister announcing the accord. "This is a critical moment for the region. Egypt's new government is assuming the responsibility and leadership that has long made this country a cornerstone of regional stability and peace," she said.

The New York Times gushed about Obama's new man crush on Morsi:

The cease-fire brokered between Israel and Hamas on Wednesday was the official unveiling of this unlikely new geopolitical partnership, one with bracing potential if not a fair measure of risk for both men. After a rocky start to their relationship, Mr. Obama has decided to invest heavily in the leader whose election caused concern because of his ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, seeing in him an intermediary who might help make progress in the Middle East beyond the current crisis in Gaza. ... Mr. Obama told aides he was impressed with the Egyptian leader’s pragmatic confidence. He sensed an engineer’s precision with surprisingly little ideology. Most important, Mr. Obama told aides that he considered Mr. Morsi a straight shooter who delivered on what he promised and did not promise what he could not deliver. “The thing that appealed to the president was how practical the conversations were — here’s the state of play, here are the issues we’re concerned about,” said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. “This was somebody focused on solving problems.”

So, Obama "invested heavily" in Morsi? Well, that investment has turned out about as well as his investment in Solyndra.

It would have been ok, if the Obama administration simply had not intervened in Egypt. But it did intervene, and ineptly. So that, Barack and Hillary are revealed once more to be rank amateurs who have absolutely no feel for politics in the Middle East. Their confidence in Morsi was as well-placed as their confidence that Al Qaeda would never attack the American consulate in Benghazi.

I have to wonder about Rebecca Solnit

I just read Rebecca Solnit's article Google eats the world.

On her Amazon web page (I love the wonderful picture of her looking soulful and sensitive), Ms. Solnit is described as a "San Francisco writer, historian, and activist ... who has worked with Native American land rights, antinuclear, human rights, antiwar and other issues as an activist and journalist."

Her article is a virulent attack on Silicon Valley companies, in particular Google, and deplores the way in which those companies have "taken over" San Francisco neighborhoods like SOMA and the Mission (she seems to be particularly obsessed with the Google bus).

Her article makes me wonder what her positions are on various other political issues.

For example, she starts by attacking Silicon Valley companies for their cozy relationship with big government:

The New York Times recently published an opinion piece that startled me, especially when I checked the byline. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the fugitive in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, focused on The New Digital Age, a book by top Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen that to him exemplifies the melding of the technology corporation and the state.

It is, he claimed, a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism, from two of our leading "witch doctors who construct a new idiom for United States global power in the twenty-first century." He added, "This idiom reflects the ever closer union between the State Department and Silicon Valley."

If Ms. Solnit is so opposed to "the ever closer union between government and Silicon Valley," what, I wonder, is her position on Obamacare? After all, Obamacare will work only if the IRS is allowed to use sophisticated software to examine everyone's sources of income to determine who is eligible for premium support. Ms. Solnit is worried that Google scans all the emails stored in Gmail. Does she have similar misgivings about the IRS using software supplied by Silicon Valley to dig ever deeper into our personal income information?

Ms Solnit then goes on to attack Silicon Valley companies for lobbying for an increase in the number of H-1B visas:

Adding newcomers might not be so bad if it didn't mean subtracting a lot of those of us who are already here. By us I mean everyone who doesn't work for a gigantic technology corporation or one of the smaller companies hoping to become a global monolith. ... Teachers, civil servants, bus drivers, librarians, firefighters - consider them representatives of the middle class under siege, as well as the people who keep a city viable and diverse. Friends of mine - a painter, a poet, a filmmaker, a photographer, all of whom have contributed to San Francisco's culture - have been evicted so that more affluent people may replace them. ... This year, [Mark] Zuckerberg formed a politically active nonprofit, FWD.us, that sought to influence the immigration debate to make it easier for Silicon Valley corporations to import tech workers.

If Ms. Solnit is so opposed to the arrival of "newcomers," what, I wonder, is her position on immigration reform in general? Is it the case that she supports immigration reform except when it threatens to raise the cost of apartments for liberal writers, artists, and public service union workers ("teachers, civil servants, bus drivers, librarians, firefighters") in San Francisco?

Her Amazon web page describes Ms. Solnit's shopping habits on Amazon:

She shops regularly at Amazon for books she can't get at her local independent bookstores, but she loves the local independents, frequents them constantly, particularly the Green Arcade and City Lights.

Does Ms. Solnit ever worry about what Amazon does with all her shopping information? If she is troubled by the fact that companies like Amazon gather, store, and analyze this data, would she be willing to stop shopping for books on Amazon?

Ms. Solnit's behavior points up one of the great dilemmas of modern life (a dilemma I have been struggling with a lot, lately): it is quite possible to stop large companies from gathering data on her: all she needs to do is stop browsing the web, making cell phone calls, using Gmail, and shopping on Amazon, and enter into a kind of Osama-bin-Laden-like isolation. The problem is that Ms. Solnit is likely not willing to stop doing any of these things. Ms. Solnit probably never stops to think that the main economic incentive for Google to create the best search engine in the world and to offer Gmail is so they can gain access to data about the interests of their users and monetize that data. Unless they harvest this data, there is no reason for Google to spend so much money providing these services. Like all liberals, Ms. Solnit probably believes that companies like Google and Amazon should provide these wonderful services without getting anything in return.

I have to wonder exactly how much Ms. Solnit really knows about the high-tech industry anyway. For example, she shrilly repeats the charge that Silicon Valley companies are racist:

Here's something else you should know about Silicon Valley: according to Mother Jones, 89% of the founding teams of these companies are all male; 82% are all white (the other 18% Asian/Pacific Islander).

Pacific Islanders? If Ms. Solnit knew anything about Silicon Valley, she would know that Samoans are much more common on our beloved 49ers (think Jesse Sapolu, Mike Iupati, and Isaac Sopoaga) than on the campuses of our software companies.

Contrary to Ms. Solnit's insinuations, Silicon Valley is one of the most diverse workplaces on the face of the planet. Silicon Valley workplaces are populated by people from all over the world. Why, my small engineering group alone consists of two Chinese, one Thai, and one Russian, in addition to two Caucasians. Alas, Ms. Solnit has probably never had the privilege of setting foot inside a Silicon Valley engineering office and meeting some of the brilliant individuals who work there. Instead, filled with suspicion of new people that she does not understand, she labels them "newcomers."

Ms. Solnit wants to keep San Francisco "viable and diverse." As I have written before, progressive activists seem to think that diversity consists of allocating a quota of privileged positions for blacks, Latinos, women, and public service employees. An influx of highly skilled young male geeks from India or China or Russia, on the other hand, is viewed by these activists not as diversity, but as a cancer destroying liberal and artistic paradises like San Francisco.

This is the face of liberal prejudice.

Solution to the BART strike: self-driving BART trains

The BART Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555 is threatening to strike.

Bay Area residents pay taxes so that an enormous capital investment can be made into a rapid transit system. Then, we hire operators, who use the threat of crippling that system and creating chaos to blackmail politicians into giving them higher pay.

I say: Automate the whole thing. We got rid of the toll takers. Let's get rid of the transit operators. Google has created self-driving cars. Self-driving BART trains should probably be a lot easier.