CNN Money describes the problems and quotes technicians about what it will take to fix it.
Experts say the major problems with the Obamacare website can’t reasonably be solved before the end of 2013, and the best fix would be to start over from scratch.
After assessing the website, Dave Kennedy, the CEO of information-security company Trusted Sec, estimates that about 20% of Healthcare.gov needs to be rewritten. With a whopping 500 million lines of code, according to a recent New York Times report, Kennedy believes fixing the site would probably take six months to a year.
But would-be Obamacare enrollees only have until Dec. 15 to sign up for coverage starting at the beginning of 2014. Nish Bhalla, CEO of information-security firm Security Compass, said it “does not sound realistic at all” that Healthcare.gov will be fully operational before that point.
“We don’t even know where all of the problems lie, so how can we solve them?” Bhalla said. “It’s like a drive-by shooting: You’re going fast and you might hit it, you might miss it. But you can’t fix what you can’t identify.”
Several computer engineers said it would likely be easier to rebuild Healthcare.gov than to fix the issues in the current system. But it’s unlikely that the government would toss out more than $300 million worth of work.
The sheer size of Healthcare.gov is indicative of a major rush job. Rolling the site out too quickly likely increased the number of errors, and that makes the fixes more difficult to implement.
“Projects that are done rapidly usually have a lot of [repetitive] code,” said Arron Kallenberg, a software engineer and tech entrepreneur. “So when you have a problem, instead of debugging something in a single location, you’re tracking it down all through the code base.”
To put 500 million lines of code into perspective, it took just 500,000 lines of code to send the Curiosity rover to Mars. Microsoft’s (MSFT, Fortune 500) Windows 8 operating system reportedly has about 80 million lines of code. And an online banking system might feature between 75 million and 100 million lines. A “more normal range” for a project like Healthcare.gov is about 25 million to 50 million lines of code, Kennedy said.
“The [500 million lines of code] says right off the bat that something is egregiously wrong,” said Kennedy. “I jumped back when I read that figure. It’s just so excessive.” …
..The New York Times report said five million lines of code need to be replaced just so the site can run properly.
But the Obamacare website has bigger problems than simply getting people registered for health care. The code is also riddled with security holes, according to Kennedy, who outlined his cybersecurity concerns on Trusted Sec’s company blog.
“If someone can’t register, that’s obviously bad — but if the information gets hacked, you’re talking about one of the biggest breaches in American history,” Kennedy said. “I think security is an afterthought at this point.”
Jonathan Goldsmith, who plays the beer company’s Most Interesting Man in the World, appeared in the second episode of the original Star Trek series, “The Corbomite Maneuver.” He only appears on screen for a moment, but he also doesn’t get a death scene.
Allegedly as well:
• He successfully spayed a tribble.
• He was kicked off the show for having too much chemistry with Kirk.
• The Borg asked to be assimilated by him.
• Some crewmen look for lovers on Risa. He prefers Vulcan.
• When he goes to Ceti Alpha VI, he really goes to Ceti Alpha VI.
Designed by Stanford White in 1904, the Italian Renaissance Revival palazzo-style Gorham Building at 390 Fifth Avenue at West 36th Street in New York.
The vertical grandiosity of the Gorham building proved a tremendous hit, and it was copied again and again all over the United States in the course of the next couple of decades.
Shorpy’s yesterday posted this photo of the Columbus Savings & Trust, built 1905.
I’m personally familiar with this style because the tallest downtown building in my hometown of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania was the Stief Drugstore Building, at the northeast corner of Main & Centre, built in the 1920s as the Shenandoah Trust Building. They tore it down in the 1970s.
I know similar buildings used to stand in Pottsville and Reading, Pennsylvania. How many more examples can readers add?
Jeanne Safer (Mrs. Richard Brookhiser) discusses her own marriage of political opposites.
This November fifth, like every Election Day for the last three decades, I’ll show up faithfully at my polling place rain or shine, even if there’s another Hurricane Sandy in New York City. Once again, I’ll be pulling the levers for some people I actually agree with, for some I’m not crazy about, and for others I’ve barely heard of. As long as they’re Democrats, they can count on my support.
It’s a matter of moral obligation, not just civic duty: I’ve got to cancel out my husband’s vote.
For thirty-three years I’ve been happily married to a man with whom I violently disagree on every conceivable political issue, including abortion, gun control, and assisted suicide. I thought the recent government shutdown was absurd, infantile, and destructive; he was a fan. And not only is he a conservative Republican, he’s a professional conservative Republican, a Senior Editor of National Review, the leading journal of conservative opinion in the country.
So why don’t we both just agree to stay home on Election Day? Because, even though I trust him with my life, I don’t trust him, and would never ask him, not to vote his conscience. It took our first decade together for me to accept that not even my considerable powers of persuasion as a psychotherapist—not to mention the self-evident correctness of my positions—would never make him change his mind, but, alas, it is so; he never even tried to change mine.
Other than my father, I never even knew any Republicans growing up, and certainly never had one for a boyfriend. But in my late twenties I joined a Renaissance singing group, and there he was—tall, clever, with intense blue eyes and a lyrical baritone. I couldn’t resist. I’d known and been treated abominably by too many men who shared all my opinions to let his convictions get in the way, and I’ve never regretted it. Our wedding was a bipartisan affair. My mentor, one of the early victims of the McCarthyite purges, gave me away, and my husband’s publisher, one of McCarthy’s most avid enforcers, gave a reading. Somehow everyone behaved, setting a trend that we have emulated with only a few brief exceptions ever since.
It was my wife Karen, who introduced the future happy couple, at her singing group many long years ago. Jeanne really doesn’t like me. I argue with her.
Native Californian Victor Davis Hanson takes a look at the bizarre lifestyle (big money, crappy housing) and even stranger politics of his own state’s technological elite.
Strip away the veneer of Silicon Valley, and it is mostly a paradox. Almost nothing is what it is professed to be. Ostensibly, communities like Menlo Park and Palo Alto are elite enclaves, where power couples can easily make $300,000 to $700,000 a year as mid-level dot.com managers.
But often these 1 percenter communities are façades of sorts. Beneath veneers of high-end living, there are lives of quiet 1-percent desperation. With new federal and California tax hikes, aggregate income-tax rates on dot.commers can easily exceed 50 percent of their gross income. And hip California 1 percenters do not enjoy superb roads and schools or a low-crime state in exchange for forking over half their income.
Housing gobbles much of the rest of their pay. A 1,300-square-foot cottage in Mountain View or Atherton can easily sell for $1.5 million, leaving the owners paying $5,000 to $6,000 on their mortgage and another $1,500 to $2,000 in property taxes each month. Add in the de rigueur Mercedes, BMW, or Lexus and the private-school tuition, and the apparently affluent turn out to have not all that much disposable income. A visitor from Mars might look at their relatively tiny houses, frenzied go-getter lifestyle, and leased BMWs, and deem them no better off materially than middle-class state employees three hours away in supposedly dismal Merced, who earn 20 percent as much, but live in a home twice as large, with only 10 percent of the monthly mortgage and tax costs.
Given exorbitant taxes and housing prices, obviously it is not just the high salaries that draw so many to the San Francisco Bay Area. The “ambiance†of year-round temperate weather, the collective confidence rippling out from new technology, the spinoff from great universities like UC Berkeley and Stanford, and the hip culture of fine eating and entertainment all tend to convince Silicon Valley denizens that they are enviable even though they must work long hours to pay high taxes and to buy tiny and often old homes.
Silicon Valley liberal politics are equally paradoxical, reflect this quiet desperation, and mask hyper-self-interest, old-fashioned rat-race competition, and 21st-century suburban versions of keeping up with the Joneses. The latter may be green, support gay marriage, and oppose restrictions on abortion, but they still are the Joneses of old who define their success by showing off to neighbors what they have, whether high-performance cars or hyper-achieving kids.
In the South Bay counties, Democratic registration outnumbers Republican often 2 to 1. If liberals like Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, and Nancy Pelosi did not represent the Bay Area, others like them would have to be invented. Yet, most Northern California liberal politics are abstractions that apparently provide some sort of psychological compensation for otherwise living lives that are illiberal to the core.
Donald E. Miller Jr.’s future remains as murky as his past.
The Fostoria man attracted national and international attention this week after a Hancock County judge ruled that Miller is still legally dead, although Miller appeared and testified in court.
In 1994, Probate Judge Allan Davis ruled that Miller was legally dead, about eight years after Miller disappeared from his Arcadia home.
That decision can’t be undone, Davis said this week. Under Ohio law, a death ruling can only be changed within three years, Davis said.
Miller’s Social Security number and driver’s license have been canceled, Miller said.
Miller, 61, is stuck for now in legal limbo with few ways out.
However, a legally dead person could appeal the judge’s decision, said John Martin, professor of law at Ohio Northern University, Ada.
Legal aid services or an enterprising attorney would likely handle the case for free, Martin said.
“Just for the fun of it, somebody should take” the case, Martin said.
Ohio’s missing-person law is necessary to settle some estates and marriages, Martin said. But revising the law to allow a person to have a clean start after a certain period would resolve cases such as Miller’s, he said.
“Why they put ‘three years’ in there is a mystery to me,” Martin said.
Miller’s attorney, Francis Marley of Fostoria, told ABCNews.com that an appeal to a higher court will “probably not” occur.
“We may go another avenue as far as federal something, but we haven’t decided yet,” Marley said. “He’s obviously disappointed. Who wouldn’t be?”
This photo actually comes from a 1975 Warn winch ad and is believed to have been taken on the Black Bear Road near Telluride, Colorado. There are some really scary roads out West.
Adam Garfinkle, writing at The American Interest, debunks the egalitarian rhetoric used to promote federalizing health care.
[N]o one seems willing to call what is going on by its real name: class-based triage, or rationing, of medical care.
We can see this more clearly if we put these two data points together: We are slowly (or not-so-slowly) but surely moving toward a much more finely gradated class-based system of healthcare. Compared to where we were before Obamacare passed, the top is moving up and the bottom is moving down faster than ever, leaving a thinner middle where most Americans with employer-provided health insurance have typically been—somewhere in the murk between HMOs and PPOs of various descriptions. Now, those who can afford it will increasingly pay more and get more. Those who cannot afford it will pay less and get less.
Now, there is nothing surprising about this, and it’s what happens in most countries with some form of government-mandated universal health care. There are always private healthcare options in those countries, for people who can afford it, to detour around the public option. But it is not what Obamacare advertised.
Actually they will pay more and get less. When they do pay less, they will be paying more for less services. It may not be obvious to them, but the insurers will have done the math.
The problem is that triage of this sort is inevitable.
The market naturally rations products and services. There’s no way to get around that. Even in a totalitarian state with a planned economy, national health care and price controls, professionals will just go to the most rewarding fields.
And there’s always a class structure. Soviet academics lived much better than their colleagues lower down on the ladder. Meanwhile Soviet medicine was pretty terrible. The smart people were going into research and then not doing any research because the entire system was too far behind to catch up.
The more the system is tampered with, the more the middle, which is a product of the free market collapses, reverting everything back to the 99 percent and 1 percent model that the left pretends we have now. Except it’s really more like a 67%, 9% and 24% model.
ObamaCare forces more doctors to become completely inaccessible to anyone other than the wealthy. The process began with HMOs, that original ingenious plan to solve the health care problem, which instead made it more expensive and less rewarding for doctors to do business. Costs kept going up and so did health care.
This is just one of the final steps on the rung before we end up with no middle ground. This won’t just have an impact on the people in the middle, it will eventually destroy the quality of medicine in general.
There’s only so much room at the top. If the only way to really make money is by treating the rich, that requires far fewer doctors and that means there’s much less room in medicine.
Medical schools will turn out more mediocrities, Third World students who excel at rote memorization but have no interest in patient care, and the top tier of medicine will continue shrinking down. There will be some good people at the top, but their numbers will diminish with each generation.
And then American medicine will die. But you’ll always be able to go and see a Nurse Practitioner for some obesity counseling.
