Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty October 10, 2013 HealthCare.Gov: Much, Much, Much Worse Than You Thought I know you're probably growing tired of "the Obamacare health-insurance exchange websites don't work" stories but this one leaves you gasping, "What?" Amid all the attention, bugs, and work happening at Healthcare.gov in light of the Affordable Care Act, potential registrants talking to phone support today have been told that all user passwords are being reset to help address the site's login woes. And the tech supports behind Healthcare.gov will be asking more users to act in the name of fixing the site, too. According to registrants speaking with Ars, individuals whose logins never made it to the site's database will have to re-register using a different username, as their previously chosen names are now stuck in authentication limbo. Delay Obamacare? Heck, at what point does this website start to count as a delay? Tell you what, Mr. President. We'll reopen the screen if you agree to waive the tax/penalty for not buying insurance and until 2014, everyone stays at this screen: 
"Why is Jim always picking on me? I'm just an unlucky subject of stock photography." And while the administration insists the performance is getting better . . . the evidence is scant: The Obama administration promised "significant improvements" in accessing the federal health overhaul website this week, after taking down the system for maintenance. But many were still unable to enroll. The administration has refused to release the numbers for how many have signed up and media outlets have struggled to find people who have actually signed up. "It wasn't designed well, it wasn't implemented well, and it looks like nobody tested it," Luke Chung, an online database programmer, told CBS News. "It's not even close. It's not even ready for beta testing for my book. I would be ashamed and embarrassed if my organization delivered something like that," he said. They insisted we were in "Recovery Summer" when there was no recovery; they insisted there wasn't a terrorist attack in Benghazi when there was, and now they're insisting the websites are working when they aren't. The spin, like the website itself, isn't working: Seven percent of Americans report that somebody in their household has tried to sign up for insurance through the health care exchanges, according to an AP-GfK poll. While that's a small percentage, it could represent more than 20 million people. Three-fourths of those who tried to sign up reported problems, though, and that's reflected in the underwhelming reviews. Overall, just 7 percent of Americans say the rollout of the health exchanges has gone well. Far more deem it a flop. Wait, there's more: Overall, the poll found, 40 percent of Americans said the launch of the insurance markets hasn't gone well, 20 percent said it's gone somewhat well and 30 percent didn't know what to say. Just 7 percent said the launch had gone "very well" or "somewhat well. Opinions are sharply divided on the overall framework of the law: 28 percent of Americans support it, 38 percent are opposed, and 32 percent don't have an opinion either way, the poll found. When asked specifically whether the government should be able to require all Americans to buy insurance or face a fine, only about 3 in 10 Americans agreed, and 68 percent were opposed. David Auerbach, writing at Slate, examines the contracting process behind this Frankenstein: The front-end static website and the back-end servers (and possibly some dynamic components of the Web pages) were developed by two different contractors. Coordination between them appears to have been nonexistent, or else front-end architect Development Seed never would have given this interview to the Atlantic a few months back, in which they embrace open-source and envision a new world of government agencies sharing code with one another. (It didn't work out, apparently.) Development Seed now seems to be struggling to distance themselves from the site's problems, having realized that however good their work was, the site will be judged in its totality, not piecemeal. Back-end developers CGI Federal, who were awarded a much larger contract in 2010 for federal health care tech, have made themselves rather scarce, providing no spokespeople at all to reporters. Their source code isn't available anywhere, though I would dearly love to take a gander (and so would Reddit). I fear the worst, given that CGI is also being accused of screwing up Vermont's health care website… The poor, confusing error handling indicates that there was no ownership of the end-to-end experience—no one tasked with making sure everything worked togetherand at full capacity, not just in isolated tests. (I can't even figure out who was supposed to own it.) No end-to-end ownership means that questions like "What is the user experience if the back-end gets overloaded or has such-and-such an error?" are never asked, because they cannot be answered by either group in isolation. Writing in Medium in defense of Development Seed, technologist and contractor CTO Adam Becker complains of "layers upon layers of contractors, a high ratio of project managers to programmers, and a severe lack of technical ownership." Sounds right to me. Likewise, the bugs around username and password standards—for example, the fact that the username required a number but the user interface didn't tell the user about it—are not problems of scale. They're problems of poor cross-group communication. Raymond Pritchett points to the public disclosure of the contract. If I'm reading this correctly, the U.S. taxpayer paid CGI something around $634 million to build this thing. Oh, and the administration was warned. "A week into it, still a lot of glitches," CNN correspondent Brian Todd reported to Blitzer. "People not able to create accounts, just to get information to possibly enroll, much less not being able to enroll in the plan." "We're also hearing now that the administration was warned about these potential problems months in advance," Todd continued. "We spoke to a health care consultant who has clients who are insurers. He says his insurers, who dealt with the administration in the months ahead of time, had contentious meetings with people at [Health and Human Services] and other health care officials who were in charge of this, warning them, 'This isn't working, it's not going to be smooth, don't do it.' He says those warnings were ignored, they went full speed ahead, and said we'll work these problems out. There's been a bit of pushback from the White House, we'll hope to get more later from them." "If they had three years to get this ready—if they weren't fully ready, they should accept the advice that a lot of Republicans are giving them, delay it another year, get it ready, and make sure it works," Blitzer said. "There are government health care-related websites that work great. Socialsecurity.gov, a whole bunch of others. They know how to do it. But if they didn't get it ready on time, then maybe fix the problem, make sure people don't have to worry about it." Other than that, the site's great. Wait, Why Does Tom Vilsack Want to Preserve America's Agricultural Culture? A strange and somewhat disturbing account of our Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, at an August event for Terry McAuliffe, from an otherwise friendly source, farmer Joel Salatin: What is the driving force behind USDA policy? In an infuriating epiphany I have yet to metabolize, I found out Wednesday in a private policy-generation meeting with Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McCauliffe. I did and still do consider it a distinct honor for his staff to invite me as one of the 25 dignitaries in Virginia Agriculture for this think-tank session in Richmond… The big surprise occurred a few minutes into the meeting: US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack walked in. He was in Terry McCauliffe love-in mode. And here is what he told us: for the first time–2012– rural America lost population in real numbers–not as a percentage but in real numbers. It's down to 16 percent of total population. I'm sitting there thinking he's going to say that number needs to go up so we have more people to love and steward the landscape. More people to care for earthworms. More people to grow food and fiber. Are you ready for the shoe to drop? The epiphany? What could the US Secretary of Agriculture, at the highest strategic planning sessions of our land, be challenged by other leaders to change this figure, to get more people in rural America, to encourage farming and help more farms get started? What could be the driving reason to have more farmers? Why does he go to bed at night trying to figure out how to increase farmers? How does the President and other cabinet members view his role as the nation's farming czar? What could be the most important contribution that increasing farmers could offer to the nation? Better food? Better soil development? Better care for animals? Better care for plants? Are you ready? Here's his answer: although rural America only has 16 percent of the population, it gives 40 percent of the personnel to the military. Say what? You mean when it's all said and done, at the end of the day, the bottom line–you know all the cliches–the whole reason for increasing farms is to provide cannon fodder for American imperial might. He said rural kids grow up with a sense of wanting to give something back, and if we lose that value system, we'll lose our military might. So folks, it all boils down to American military muscle. It's not about food, healing the land, stewarding precious soil and resources; it's all about making sure we keep a steady stream of youngsters going into the military. This puts an amazing twist on things. You see, I think we should have many more farmers, and have spent a lifetime trying to encourage, empower, and educate young people to go into farming. It never occurred to me that this agenda was the key to American military power. Lest I be misread, I am not opposed to defending family. I am not opposed to fighting for sacred causes. I am violently opposed to non-sacred fighting and meddling in foreign countries, and building empires. The Romans already tried that and failed. But to think that my agenda is key to building the American military–now that's a cause for pause. I will redouble my efforts to help folks remember why we need more farmers. It's not to provide cannon fodder for Wall Street imperialistic agendas. It's to grow food that nourishes, land that's aesthetically and aromatically sensually romantic, build soil, hydrate raped landscapes, and convert more solar energy into biomass than nature would in a static state. I can think of many, many righteous and noble reasons to have more farms. Why couldn't he have mentioned any of these? Any? Detroit's Pension Managers: Somehow Worse than 'Total Economic Illiteracy' Megan McArdle: I'm rarely speechless, but I'm having trouble putting my emotions into words after reading the latest report on the Detroit pension situation. Now, I admit it: I'm kind of naïve. Usually when I see an underfunded pension, I think to myself "poor pensioners -- undone by a combination of stupid tax rules, volatile stock markets and mismanagement by trustees who tried to restore depleted fund assets with an investment approach you might call 'desperate optimism'." Thus, I was not entirely prepared for the new revelations about the Detroit trustees' custom of handing out annual holiday "bonuses" to workers, retirees and the City of Detroit. Between 1985 and 2008, they handed out roughly $1 billion this way. Had they been invested, one estimate says those funds would be worth almost $2 billion today -- or more than half the current shortfall in the funds. Translation: With a city job, you get a pension -- you kick in some, your employer kicks in some, and that money goes into a big fund and it's invested, and hopefully the investments collect dividends. Normally, you're supposed to take those dividends and reinvest them -- this helps keep the fund stable and growing to cover the payouts to retirees in the future. Instead, the pension managers handed out the incoming money like Santa Claus. McArdle continues: It's very hard for me to attribute this to something benign, like total economic illiteracy or gross inattention to their responsibilities as pension trustees. I can't imagine that anyone who can read and do basic arithmetic ever thought that draining off the "excess earnings" in the good years could result in anything other than exactly what it has wrought: a pension fund so disastrously underfunded that it may not be salvageable. No, wait, that's too kind: they were also draining off … what should we call them? "excess non-earnings"? in years when the economy was melting down, the Dow Jones was trading for less than a Mickey Mantle rookie card and the region's chief industry was teetering on the brink of extinction. What could they possibly have been thinking? My best guess is that they were thinking the pensions would have to be paid, one way or another. After all, it's in the Michigan State Constitution. So they could pay out bonuses, please various constituencies, and then force the city or the state to make them whole when it all came tumbling down. They didn't reckon with the possibility that the city would simply run out of money, and the state would decline to step in, leaving them with no deep pockets to make up for their mismanagement. It's hard to overstate how bad this is. It says something about our era that McArdle ranks "total economic illiteracy" among the potentially benign factors. ADDENDUM: This morning, the Nobel Prize Committee has tried to reach out to author Alice Munro, to inform her she has won the Nobel Prize for Literature . . . but has left a message.
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