Wednesday October 29, 2013

ObamaCare Systems Issue

I've worked in the computer field for all my adult life.  I refuse to rejoice in other people's problems.

Yes, the ObamaCare systems have problems, and that is causing significant pain from President Obama on through the IT.

I have this observation for your input (if you like).  I've never met anyone in Information Technology that was not overly concerned about the systems they were working on.  These are not teenagers who care nothing about consistency, accuracy and errors.  They are humans that make mistakes, and most of the time will work very very hard to correct those mistakes.  

1. People want to succeed, where success in IT is a working system with minimal problems.
2. People will work around the clock to solve their problems. More often than not this leads to mistakes that cause other problems (unforeseen consequences).  Traders (and Investors) know that once emotions (like fear) enter the picture, the mind becomes irrational.  Mistakes, devastating mistakes, are made.  
3. More money given to people (who are usually not motivated day to day by money - unlike many of the rest of us) will not solve the issue.  And it is also rare to solve the problems via more people.  The people who built the system know the system better than anyone else.  

Having been an architect and programmer in very large systems (but nothing the size of the ObamaCare systems), there are huge technical issues that must be solved.  For example, a large system that requires update capabilities will have record locking issues, and if record locking is not accomplished down to the record / column level, computer people know they can lock out whole sections of the database.  Of course, we know after many years how to solve that issue; until?  Until the problem is locking at the object level somewhere above the database.  

I have no idea how the ObamaCare system was architected - where architecture means, Business, information, and technical architecture.  If you are unaware, then simply, a system at run time is a full interactive across process, functional, and technical components.  They do not work in isolation even if the system was architected  for components to work in isolation.  This means (to me) one could test a component and it works fine.  Test with 100 interactive components, and it does not work.  

It appears from reports that security is a major issue for the ObamaCare system.  If that is true, then the system should be removed from use until that is solved.  There is way too much individual information that would be useful for the bad guys.  Stealing your identity would be extremely lucrative.  That means ObamaCare has to have world class security because it is a government program and every single Chinese and Russian hacker is going to try to get into the system.  Therefore, when an architect builds such a system, Security becomes the number one principle (and concern) in the system.

Now here is why...  Because Security is not part of functionality.  Security affects every single layer (or component of the system), and to change the design after the fact has a high probabiliyt of causing catastrophic change to the whole system. Possibly, no reader of my blog understands how much trouble can be caused by lack of security at some level. Rarely if ever have I found an executive that understands (or cares).  They just want it to work. If security is designed and implemented incorrectly, then it affects every single log-on in the system and anything to do with log-on security.  But security only starts there.

We are told the Government has spent $634 million, and they will likely spend much more to fix all the issues.  A system as large as ObamaCare requires a design that will handle distributed computing.  Disaster Recovery requirements are critical.  Last week the system crashed, and 14 states could not operate.  This is another design principle.  These principles are part of design (architecture).  

I know you do not what to think about that problem, but that system has to handle a user logging in from anywhere in the world, authenticate them (if they have created and account), and route them.  That is a lot of single points of failure to design around before the user even gets to doing useful work.  

The point is, there are many very difficult computer science and engineering problems with a system that must support millions upon millions of users every single day.  My best wishes go out to the people, as I've been there.

Nobody likes stuff that does not work, however. And so far the rollout of Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges make the Facebook IPO look like a gigantic success.

On the other hand, executives are responsible for systems that do not work.  While it is painful, they must be willing to take the system off line until they are sure the problems they know about are fixed.  The Democrats can blame it on the Republicans, but in the end, Mr. Obama is responsible.  Now he will find that winning on implmenting ObamaCare over the Republican shouting over it, is not a game.  No body is winning, and this fiasco is causing harm to Mr. Obama as an executive.  Please do not rejoice over that either.  

If ObamaCare was repealed (which it will not be), conservatives should/could rejoice.  Do not rejoice where you may think it will cause ObamaCare to fail.  IT systems do not on the whole cause businesses to fail, and with the amount of money the Government has, IT will not cause Obamacare to fail.  The systems will cause consternation and anger at all levels, there is no doubt what-so-ever.  However, their systems may cause Obamacare to be delayed if the Democrats can find a way to spin the story such that it does not cost them in the 2014 elections.  

In hindsight, there are likely only four corporations available to the US government that could have designed and built such a system in such a short time-frame: Google, IBM, Amazon or Microsoft.  This does not mean their normal consulting arms could have done it either. My experience with Microsoft consulting is it could not have built this system, and it is highly unlikely that IBM's consulting arm could have either.  The second tier corporations would have been Oracle (with BEA and SUN), SalesForce, and a few other extremely large SaaS/PaaS successes.  

To the systems people, I empathize with the your problems.  To the President of the USA - delay Obamacare until Google or IBM concurs it will work.  That may take a good long time in the context of human pressures (a year or more), but every one of us must be assured the system is secure and accurate.  

THERE IS NO ROOM FOR ERRORS - NOT ANY ERRORS - identity theft, lost records, information that is shared accidentally, and so-on.  We turn to you Mr. President, to realize that a huge complex system like this cannot be used by We, the People until we have those assurances.

More Troublesome for Obamacare than IT

White House spokesman Jay Carney admitted Monday some Americans won't be able to hold onto their current healthcare plans under Obamacare — despite the president's 2009 emphatic promise "if you like your healthcare plan, you'll be able to keep your healthcare plan. Period."

"So it's true there are existing healthcare plans on the individual market that do not meet those minimum standards and therefore do not qualify for the Affordable Care Act," Carney said in response to a question about an earlier remark by David Axelrod, a senior adviser to President Barack Obama during his first term, the Weekly Standard reported.

What the president said and what everybody said all along is that there are going to be changes brought about by the Affordable Care Act to create minimum standards of coverage, minimum services that every insurance plan has to provide, so that an individual shopping for insurance, you know, when he or she purchases that insurance, knows that maternity care is covered, that preventive services are covered, that mental health services are covered, that the insurance policy you buy doesn't have [an] annual limit or a lifetime limit, that there are out-of-pocket expenses capped at a maximum level, both annually and for a lifetime."

The new requirements have prompted some insurers to raise the premiums — dramatically in some cases, according to the The Washington Post — for people who bought bare-bones plans on the individual market.

Why is this not disturbing to more people?  I just sigh...  I don't know why there are not marches everywhere; civil unrest everywhere; and hope that we can clear up the political fiasco before blood is spilled.   

From my observation, ObamaCare has been an obfuscation from the very beginning from things being call fines (instead of taxes) to service costs that are direct taxes as stated by the Supreme Court. 

  More from the news:  (all this comes from an NBC report with quotes NBC received from the Washington Post)...

"Remember: The President didn’t say if you like your plan and we approve it you can keep it," Stewart wrote, the Post reported. "He promised that if you like your plan, you can keep it, period— “no matter what.”

Yet the NBC report said the government knew that wasn't true, saying that buried in regulations from the July 2010 law was an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, “40 to 67 percent” of customers will not be able to keep their policy.

And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.”