surreal and more surreal

[mike777]

I was listening to NPR again while driving, I think I got this right.

 

A week or so back, a reporter called up e-trade, or some such, to buy a treasury note. Face value of $1,000 and due at the end of this month. The purchase price was $999.78. The point they made was that confidence in the U.S. government had not fallen so much as to be too costly. But then they announced that today a $1,000 note costs $999.99. Of course it is now nerer to the due date. I was still struck by the fact that the profit of 22 cents for a note bought a week ago is 22 times the profit for a note bought today.

 

All of which proves I don't know nothing about finance. Nothing new there.

22 cents on a note bought a week back works out to maybe a little more than a penny a day, say $4.00 per year. So it's a 0.4% per year interest rate, more or less. That sounds like something I would expect. But who buys these things for 999.99?

 

 

leverage.

 

They borrow millions at basically zero %.... this is how the fed keeps the system working.....

 

Now do this day after day after day....

 

also it works the other way.....borrow at zero sell bonds for over 1000 and pocket the profit when you buy back at 1000 again at zero cost..yes the fed jacks up prices to over 1000 then lets you borrow at zero.

[hrothgar]

They had three and a half years to build a web-site. And, oh crap! Not only does it not work. But there is nobody to blame, and not a clue as to what is wrong with it, nor when it will be fixed.

 

I would have been very surprised if the web site had a nice, smooth, error free launch.

 

Almost anything of this magnitude is going to have teething pains.

It's a fact of life.

 

I don't care if the web site was written by government contractors or private industry...

The start of a big launch is painful.

 

For all those people who are working themselves up into a tizzy over this, I'd just like to remind them of some examples from the last year:

 

Romey's centralized command and control site for "Get out the Vote" efforts (Project Orca) was all but unusable on election night.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83653.html

 

Apple's new mapping application had a disastrous launch, as did their IOS 7 release.

[mike777]

The metric remains, 50 million don't have insurance...do the uninsured have insurance now? Is insurance cheaper and quality of care better? All the rest is nonsense and a distraction.

 

At this point I can report my insurance is much higher as are many around me. At this point this is hurting people...

[Winstonm]

The metric remains, 50 million don't have insurance...do the uninsured have insurance now? Is insurance cheaper and quality of care better? All the rest is nonsense and a distraction.

 

At this point I can report my insurance is much higher as are many around me. At this point this is hurting people...

 

The law calls for the uninsured to have insurance on January 1, 2014, which, at last check, was not now. The cost of insurance is higher than in the past because we are not purchasing the same product as in the past - there are some for whom cost will be higher, but for low-income Americans the cost will be lower due to tax credits, while the choices of plan types is much broader.

[kenberg]

I've been waiting for Obama to say "You're doing a heck of a job, Sebby". Glitches are to be expected, glitches of the currently reported magnitude really should lead to a resignation, just as the muck-up after Katrina required resignations. You only get to screw things up so much before you turn the job over to someone else.

 

I am not required, or at least it is my understanding that I am not required, to register on this site. Whew!. I would be very reluctant to interact with a site that is so badly designed. The administration will look monumentally silly if they fine people who do not register on a site that is not, or for a large part of the sign up period was not, working. The order of events must be: a. Get the site working then b. Set the deadline for when registration must be completed.

 

This is too bad, and that's a huge understatement. Ten years from now, no one will really remember who was president during the Benghazi attack. They will remember who was president when the ACA was put in place just as everyone knows who was president when Social Security started. It is largely seen by supporters as Obama's hallmark achievement. It was the bete noir for the recent Tea Party nonsense. How Obama could allow this to crash so badly is incomprehensible to me.

 

What was it Truman said? Oh yes, the buck stops here.

[hrothgar]

The metric remains, 50 million don't have insurance...do the uninsured have insurance now? Is insurance cheaper and quality of care better? All the rest is nonsense and a distraction.

 

At this point I can report my insurance is much higher as are many around me. At this point this is hurting people...

 

I suggest that you invest more time and effort searching the exchanges for good policies.

There's all sorts of anecdotal evidence about individuals complaining that the new policies are much more expensive.

Typically, it turns out that folks didn't do a good search.

 

In some cases this is a deliberate attempt to create a biased narrative (see http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/10/sean-hannity-cant-be-bothered-truth)

In others, its poor search.

 

Most studies are showing that the prices on the exchanges are significantly less than what people are paying before.

 

I'm quite sure that there are some people who are going to be worse off under the new regime. However, I don't expect this to be widespread.

[y66]

Good story here: How The First Internet President Produced The Government’s Biggest, Highest-Stakes Internet Failure by Alex Howard

 

I’d like to believe it’s possible to reform procurement without completely starting over, if only because that’s not an option for federal agencies. The problem is that here, we’re talking about real money and real power. Entrenched players have genuine reasons to fight change, from the systems integrators to the big enterprise IT companies that Vivek Kundra memorably called as “IT cartel” as he left office.

 

The Obama administration, perhaps ironically, has made several other important steps toward this much-needed change, from introducing Presidential Innovation Fellows to bringing in entrepreneurs-in-residence. Indeed, the Department of Health and Human Services’ young chief technology officer, Bryan Sivak, has been pushing for many of these changes throughout his career in government. The part of Healthcare.gov that he was responsible for — the front end — was built using agile development, open source, and open standards, working in the open on GitHub with a small D.C. startup. Notably, that part of the site has worked in the midst of all the challenges that the site has had over the past two weeks. The rest of the site, built by CGI Federal, QSSI, and a dozen other contractors, was, by contrast, business as normal. As The New York Times documented Sunday in a well-reported feature on issues at Healthcare.gov, political decisions drove deadlines and the inability of government officials to say that it was not ready for prime time.

 

The sad truth is that unless we reform how government buys, builds, and maintains information technology, we will continue to get more Healthcare.govs. They’ll be built at regulatory agencies, scientific agencies, or places like HUD or the Department of Education or nameless federal agencies that most people don’t know exist, along with higher-profile ailing IT projects at the Department of State. Federal IT may be too big to succeed.

 

I have no doubt that this debacle is incredibly embarrassing for the president and his administration. It’s given huge political ammunition to the opponents of the Affordable Care Act and unfortunately further damaged the trust and the government’s ability to accomplish big things throughout the country. It’s not clear if the tech will be able to be fixed in time for the second stage of people rushing to get insurance before the deadline.

[ArtK78]

Well, the Obamacare website has been active now for three weeks. I guess it is long past time to declare the whole system a failure. After all, not everyone in the country is getting healthcare for less money than they paid before, and there are still many who have no health insurance. Furthermore, the problems with the website are legendary.

 

Yes, three weeks is certainly enough time to conclude that this is a disaster. After all, who could possibly expect that it would take more than three weeks to cure the decades of neglect in the health care system that has brought us to this point.

 

All of the criticism of Obamacare is right. There was no point to this high-minded exercise in socialism. And it will bring America to its knees - mark my words. Yes, Obamacare is no doubt the worst thing to ever happen to this country (I know, Jon Stewart did mention that there was something called slavery in this country at one time, but clearly Obamacare is worse).

[y66]

No sarcasm in the water cooler please!

[Winstonm]

No sarcasm in the water cooler please!

 

And no fighting in the war room!

[y66]

The spectacular failure of the healthcare.gov launch is a huge hit to the launch of Obamacare 1.0. But Obamacare will survive, thrive even, because there currently are no good alternatives.

[y66]

Good one Winston.

[blackshoe]

What was it Truman said? Oh yes, the buck stops here.

I have the distinct impression that in Obama's world view there is no buck.

[mycroft]

Well, that makes a nice change from his predecessor...oh wait.

[kenberg]

For me, it is not at all a matter of declaring Obamacare a failure. I wish it well. it is a matter of acknowledging a screw-up when I see it. The Tea Party shut down was a monumental Republican screw up, I hope Republicans can see that this is so. The roll-out of Obamacare was a pretty significant screw-up as well. In both cases the result will be a reduction in the stature of the people responsible. There is no way around this fact.

 

I really do not care if we are looking at FEMA after Katrina under GWB or the roll-out of Obamacare under BO. A botched job is a botched job. Hari-Kari is not required, but an acknowledgement of reality is always to be desired.

[ArtK78]

In my opinion, it would have been far more surprising if the rollout of Obamacare went off without a hitch. It is unusual for a website or any involved program (and I don't mean computer program) to be implemented without initial hiccups. So the fact that there are problems in the first few weeks doesn't surprise me at all.

 

The problems will be fixed. The real test of Obamacare is how well it works after the initial technical problems are behind us. From what I have heard, the initial reaction to the substance of the program is quite favorable.

[kenberg]

Without a hitch would indeed have been surprising. It presumably would have been particularly surprising to Kathleen Sebelius who was given detailed descriptions of the many very substantial flaws.

 

 

Some years back, actually quite a few years back, something similar happened where I wroked. A much smaller system, rolled out with great fanfare, and great failure. "It was working fine". "Too many people were using it at once". "People were not reading the directins properly" etc. Finally someone realized the system was not working properly. Really? What a guy!

 

That there should be glitches is to be expected, certainly that is so. As I get it, "glitch", or "hitch", is not the word that comes to mind for people who actually have to try and cope with it.

[y66]

It would be extremely cool if Kathleen Sibelius & Co. could turn this around. If it were just a hardware scaling problem, they might be able to pull it off. But it sounds like it's way more serious than that. This looks like it will go down in history as the Titanic of web launches.

[ArtK78]

It would be extremely cool if Kathleen Sibelius & Co. could turn this around. If it were just a hardware scaling problem, they might be able to pull it off. But it sounds like it's way more serious than that. This looks like it will go down in history as the Titanic of web launches.

Seems like a particularly inappropriate metaphor. The Titanic sailed from England on a smooth journey initially until it ran into the iceberg, which proved fatal. The web launch was rocky from the beginning - but not fatal - and, hopefully, the problems will be corrected and it will be smooth sailing thereafter.

[kenberg]

Ah yes, Kathleen not Katherine. I fixed it. Seb with and e, not Sib with an i though.

 

At

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/health-insurance-exchange-launched-despite-signs-of-serious-problems/2013/10/21/161a3500-3a85-11e3-b6a9-da62c264f40e_story.html?wpisrc=nl_politics

and elsewhere we find Obama saying:

 

“There’s no sugarcoating it: The Web site is too slow; people have been getting stuck during the application process,” he said at a White House event.

 

Too slow? Is that what people have been saying? I have been hearing "I can't get on", "It mishandles the data" and other such things.

 

The lead paragraph from the story above says

"Days before the launch of President Obama’s online health ­insurance marketplace, government officials and contractors tested a key part of the Web site to see whether it could handle tens of thousands of consumers at the same time. It crashed after a simulation in which just a few hundred people tried to log on simultaneously."

 

"There is no sugarcoating it, the cabins on the Titanic are too damp", to use your analogy.

[PassedOut]

“There’s no sugarcoating it: The Web site is too slow; people have been getting stuck during the application process,” he said at a White House event.

I don't doubt that folks have had problems. I avoided the site the first couple of weeks (as I do with all new sites), then set up an account pretty easily without any particular slowdowns or problems. That's not to say that I won't run into a problem in the future, but I wonder how many folks complaining about the website's problems have actually experienced them personally.

[kenberg]

I don't doubt that folks have had problems. I avoided the site the first couple of weeks (as I do with all new sites), then set up an account pretty easily without any particular slowdowns or problems. That's not to say that I won't run into a problem in the future, but I wonder how many folks complaining about the website's problems have actually experienced them personally.

 

That is very good to hear. I don't need to use it, or at least I don't think that I do, but I know several who will need to use it. The reports I have heard have not been encouraging.

 

So you are right, I have not had direct experience here. There was a discussion recently on the local public television station (WETA) with some wh had tried it. As I recall, only one successfully completed the entire venture, and that was after a lot of difficulty.

 

It seems to me that if they knew there were problems and knew what they were, it would have been very senssible to just hold it up a bit. That way they would have free access for fixing it. This way they shut it down for a few hours at a time, then bring it back up, then shut it down and so on. Seems dumb to me.

[PassedOut]

That is very good to hear. I don't need to use it, or at least I don't think that I do, but I know several who will need to use it. The reports I have heard have not been encouraging.

Based on the news reports, I had expected problems. I'm used to news reports being sensationalized, but still expected to see some sort of bug or unsatisfactory performance. Was a bit surprised at how easily and smoothly everything went for me. That's not to say, of course, that I won't be finding myself swearing a blue streak at it sometime in the future.

[ArtK78]

That is very good to hear. I don't need to use it, or at least I don't think that I do, but I know several who will need to use it. The reports I have heard have not been encouraging.

 

So you are right, I have not had direct experience here. There was a discussion recently on the local public television station (WETA) with some wh had tried it. As I recall, only one successfully completed the entire venture, and that was after a lot of difficulty.

 

It seems to me that if they knew there were problems and knew what they were, it would have been very senssible to just hold it up a bit. That way they would have free access for fixing it. This way they shut it down for a few hours at a time, then bring it back up, then shut it down and so on. Seems dumb to me.

Dumb seems to be par for the course in web sites. Let me pass along a recent experience.

 

My girlfriend uses Yahoo mail for her e-mail. Recently, Yahoo changed the appearance and functionality of its e-mail site. Not only do users have to get used to a different appearance for no obvious reason, but some of the functions that they used in the past are no longer available. My girlfriend complained to me about it, telling me that some things she used to be able to do to handle a bunch of e-mails at once she now has to do one at a time. I didn't follow exactly what she was trying to do, but the intent was clear - the new setup causes more work, not less. Furthermore, I saw a note on Yahoo about the changes to the mail site, and Yahoo essentially said get used to it because they were not going back.

 

I only use Yahoo mail for my fantasy football league, which is on Yahoo. Since we started this season of fantasy football, my Yahoo mail account has been disabled 3 times. I could not reactivate my account using any of the tools online - I had to call Yahoo help by phone. They gave me the e-mail address of Yahoo technical support. In the first two instances, this resulted in a quick fix. This last time I received e-mail responses essentially saying it was a temporary problem and it would resolve itself. My response to that was I told them where to put their temporary problem and to fix my account, which they did. So, at least for now, I have access to my Yahoo e-mail account.

 

The bottom line is that it is not necessarily that easy to get a website to work properly, especially when you have a lot of people trying to use it at the same time. The Obamacare website is brand new - it stands to reason that there would be some problems. The Yahoo e-mail site has been up and running for decades. And they are still having problems.

[PassedOut]

The bottom line is that it is not necessarily that easy to get a website to work properly, especially when you have a lot of people trying to use it at the same time. The Obamacare website is brand new - it stands to reason that there would be some problems. The Yahoo e-mail site has been up and running for decades. And they are still having problems.

Still, the fact that lots of commercial websites have problems is not all that comforting for folks who need healthcare. I do expect better from the US government than from corporations, and I hope folks get the service they need. (Maybe they took the site up too quickly because all of the news at the time was about the government shutdown. I'm not a politician, so often can't figure out what goes through their heads, if anything.)