Oregon Health exchange board puts director on notice over stalled website | Hacker News Reader

Oregon Health exchange board puts director on notice over stalled website

oregonlive.com

36 pointsmountaineer45 comments

It is stunning how this past year has changed my views on government. Between this massive healthcare fuck up, the spying, the shutdown, and all the rest that doesn't need mentioning, I am basically becoming a crotchety old conservative who says formulaic things like: "Government can't do anything right"; "Governments never give up power once you let them have it". I basically went from a liberal college student to a full blown conservative/libertarian (if I pigeonhole myself into common stereotypes). Of course, I'm not even that, because I wouldn't vote for those fucking idiots either.

To be fair, this generally happens with age anyway. We slowly come to the realization that idealism is often a mask for arrogance and a false-confidence borne of insecurity. As we mature, we not only see the failings of our former naive selves, but the folly of such idealism in and of itself. The opposite of idealism is not cynicism, but realism.

Hold on there. Realism isn't ideological. One person's realism may be turning to conservatism, another person's realism may be pushing to systematically address failures in government to prevent them in future cases.

Indeed it may, but it's a general framework of pragmatism which accepts short term compromises along the way. Often leading to less than ideal outcomes in the long run. Hence, my claim it is the opposite of idealism. Not necessarily a better opposite.

> Governments never give up power once you let them have it

This is a universal truth.

No, it isn't. Unless you mean that governments don't relinquish power unless they're designed to, but that's a big difference. Nor is it true that governments can't due anything well by virtue of being governments. What is true is that governments are complex (and thus difficult to get right) and usually have a high inertia. It's also true that individuals tend not to relinquish power, both out of self-interest and a lack of trust/belief in the other guy.

> Unless you mean that governments don't relinquish power unless they're designed to, but that's a big difference.

No I mean once they've taken it or the people give them that power, they don't relinquish it.

Consider the extensions to the Patriot Act.

"The provisions -- passed after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack -- deal with roving wiretaps, the tracking of alleged "lone wolf" terrorists, and the ability of law enforcement officials to obtain records they deem relevant to an investigation after securing an order from a federal court."

http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/05/27/congress.patriot.act/

> Nor is it true that governments can't due anything well by virtue of being governments.

Governments can't do anything well because they are bureaucratic nightmares.

> Governments can't do anything well because they are bureaucratic nightmares.

And what's the difference between a government and a large corporation? "No government can do anything well" is lazy thinking.

Prohibition, price controls, so many monopoly regulations, financial regulation, etc,etc.

The word government defines a broad group of entities. Using any absolute terms here likely is a mistake.

In general, people in power resist giving up power. Seizing additional power acts as a conduit to keep the existing power. The greater ones power, the more numerous one's enemies become. There are different reasons why this occurs. In some circumstances it is because those individuals did things that were illegal and face either prison or death at the loss of power (typical of an absolute ruler, Saddam Hussein, Robert Mugabe.)

Groups of individuals can behave similarly in shared self-interest. Private citizens and corporations can also be viewed as behaving the same.

What separates government from the private citizen or group is the general ability to use lethal force, theft, and imprisonment over very long periods of time and on a massive scale. Historically the relinquishment of power is generally one of a transfer of power, or some other bargain; sometimes through outright force and demand (Magna Carta and subsequent events, etc.)

The private citizen and corporation is certainly capable of using lethal force, theft, and imprisonment. However, without government complicity it is not possible forever or at scale.

Government only keeps as much power as its citizens allow it to.

typical approach of blaming the victim. You miss completely on the fact of force and information asymmetry.

My statement was a bit to hasty, I admit that. Resting control of your rights back from the government in the US is probably fraught with a lot less peril than doing so in Russia (i.e. Pussy Riot).

As a US citizen, I am dismayed at the situation, and like other posters here, my sentiment towards government has shifted greatly over the last six months. As a US citizen, I don't know what the solution is other than radical transparency in government and citizens as a whole having violent disdain for apathy in the political process.

You're not the first. You may enjoy looking up the story of Dr. Thomas Sowell. Right out of college (which included studying under Milton Friedman) he was a self identified Marxist. He went to work in a federal bureaucracy and soon completely changed course, becoming one of the most well known conservative/libertarian advocates for the last 40 years.

There's a such thing as "liberaltarian" you might be interested in investigating, but as I've gotten older, I think an attitude of anti-incumbency, "throw the bums out," is a healthy one that at least provides a benefit of fresh perspectives.

Normally it takes getting into a higher tax bracket to force this type of conversion. :-)

The nice thing about conservatives is they don't believe in the power of government to do things right. The bad thing is that this sometimes leads to putting incompetent people in jobs of authority since the expectations are so low. ("You're doing a helluva job Brownie!")

On the flip side, the Democrats historically have wanted to put more competent managers in (not always!) because they believed that government can solve real problems. The reality is there's a limit to central planning, so lots of great intentions go awry.

Hayek [1] covers a lot of the theoretical underpinnings to this. It's worth reading the first two books, though be aware of the historical context. It was a time of competition against what appeared to be an unassailable centrally planned Soviet machine.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/F.-A.-Hayek/e/B000AQ6W60

I am a firm believer that neither party is a judge who makes a good manager. All they want is someone who makes a good party member.

In the words of Winston Churchill: "If you're not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at forty you have no brain."

From the "Quotes Falsely Attributed" page [1] on the official Churchill Centre website:

"If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain." There is no record of anyone hearing Churchill say this. Paul Addison of Edinburgh University makes this comment: "Surely Churchill can't have used the words attributed to him. He'd been a Conservative at 15 and a Liberal at 35! And would he have talked so disrespectfully of Clemmie, who is generally thought to have been a lifelong Liberal?"

[1] http://www.winstonchurchill.org/learn/speeches/quotations/qu...

I'm feeling a tangible dissonance brought on by these two seemingly inconsistent truths:

* The government is incompetent at implementing good programs, like healthcare reform.

* The government is very competent at doing bad things, like domestic spying.

They're probably equally bad at both things, but being incompetent isn't a problem.

They've totally screwed up health care, and they're not giving up, they're going to try even harder to get it working.

On secret projects there's even less incentive to admit failure and kill the project because there's no public oversight. For all we know, the NSA spying programs were delayed a dozen times and came in billions over budget...

>For all we know

In at least one big case, we do in fact know it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trailblazer_Project

I'm a firm believer in the lack of competency in all things governmental.

The government is terrible at domestic spying. "Grab everything and look for interesting stuff" is a terrible way to do it - expensive, complex to whole new levels of complexity, and the miniscule amount of data you actually seek is lost in the deluge of noise of all the data you don't need.

The only thing the government is any good at is ensuring that government retains the power it needs to stay governing.

it's never been said they're actually good at spying (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/BUGGER)

I'll trade you "Government" for "a(ny) massive organization". It has been my experience that this sort of incompetence is not restricted to the public sector.

California's exchange: 28k people signed up in the first week.

Washington's exchange: 55k enrolled (mostly in Medicaid) in October, and another 40k applied for coverage.

Colorado: 37k in October.

Kentucky: 32k.

New York: 47k.

There were some glitches here in Washington. They had stability and speed problems at launch. They took the site down for a few hours, and then overnight, for maintenance. Within 48 hours, it was fixed and has been stable ever since.

One of the keys to Washington's success was to treat the exchange as essentially a startup. They sought people to build the site who thought it was a great thing to do and found it exciting and interesting, not contractors who would see it as just more 9 to 5 work to do.

Article on the above: http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-washington-obamacare-201...

I don't know the specifics of the Washington healthcare exchange, but I can tell you right now, the healthcare.gov didn't fail because they chose contractors to do the job, they failed because of extremely incompetent management on the government side. Had a start up been chosen to do healthcare.gov, and none of the government management were changed, even the best start up would've failed too.

The same contractors that did healthcare.gov (CGI Federal) also developed the Kentucky exchange, which has been lauded as one of the more successful state exchanges. If the contractor was the problem, you'd have expected them to fail in Kentucky too.

Not calling you wrong, but it looks like there were concerns about the competence of the contractors[0]. It was certainly paired with bad management, though.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/11/15/245399...

"Oracle vice president Tom Budnar told the board that his firm had brought in additional people, including a "swat team" to ensure the site should be able to enroll people by the end of December."

This is a vice president at a software company?

> This is a vice president at a software company?

This is a vice president at Oracle.

I hope he didn't really mean "swat" and it was simply misinterpreted by the writer. Perhaps he meant bringing in a SWOT team [1]. In big corps I've often heard SWOT used when an emergency happens.

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis

No, he probably did mean SWAT. It's been used by management (as well as the term "tiger teams") to describe a supposed crack team of members that will just swoop in and get everything fixed.

You obviously is a swat to swat bugs in your software!

This is a strategy template, not a trauma checklist. Unless you're intentionally being Ironic. BigCos may be slow and even dumb but they're not typically stupid.

This /is/ Oracle we're talking about here, so those aren't odds I'd bet on, personally.

King at the end of the meeting clarified that he never asked Oracle to bring in additional people – just better ones.

If the current batch of people can't get the job done, replacing them is reasonable.

My money is on the technical people being perfectly competent but the business stakeholders fighting over turf and the systems architecture being what suffers. This is already guaranteed given the number of moving parts involved, but with a government project requiring partnership with private business (the actual insurance companies .. or heck, even Medicaid), it has to be much, much worse than normal.

I can just picture in my head a developer requesting an RESTful API for simple data interchange and the current owner of the legacy system they're asking about being 1) clueless, 2) hamstrung, or 3) actively impeding progress. Repeat this song and dance ad infinitum over the course of the project and you end up with a complex system designed to work in the specific use case of the conference room pilot prior to go-live ... but which will fail everything else.

I have quite a bit of experience with at least a couple of the same Oracle products that are in the middle of this fiasco. Competent technical people or not, the products being implemented here have a reasonably well known track record (amongst their users) of just plain not working.

Oracle is huge. It has 17 Senior/Executive Vice Presidents[1] and a lot more "normal" vice presidents[2]. Looks like[3] Tom Budnar is [one of the] VP at "North America Technology & Government Consulting".

[1] http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/executives/index.ht...

[2] http://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?orig=TSEO_SN&company=oracl...

[3] https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/oregonhix/meetings/transc...

You would think that the "A-team" would have already been on such a high-profile and time-sensitive project from the beginning, but who knows.

No matter how you feel about Obamacare I think it's had an effect I certainly never would have predicted: At this point it's become kind of an indictment of the software industry, whether deserved or undeserved. It seems like every news story ends up insinuating that devs are incompetent.

Time sensitive? Sure there was a fairly hard deadline but the Oregon site has been under construction for 3 years.

As for incompetent developers, I don't know if the public thinks that at all. I think the standard public response is the usual gov't bureaucracy getting in the way. States communicating with multiple Fed departments has got to be daunting. And if one of those isn't online and working properly or changes requirements midway through you've got some problems.

I hope this is a watershed moment for government IT. There have been bigger government IT failures before (IRS modernization - 12 years, $3.7 billion) but never before has a government IT project failure jeopardized the success of a major policy initiative and had negative consequences for millions of Americans.

I hope this is finally the kick in the pants that the government needs to fixing the fundamentally broken parts of the government IT procurement process.

Someone never read Brooks.

"King at the end of the meeting clarified that he never asked Oracle to bring in additional people – just better ones."

Looks like your Mr King sort of skimmed the book.

(From the UK: land of the millions of pound software failures)

PS: Oracle isn't the government people

Welcome to corporate America, replaying the worst team structures of the 80s and 90s. Seems the new fad is to have even more layers than before. Essentially, too many to make a good decision but enough to prevent anyone from taking responsibility when it fails.

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