"I work on a large, complicated US Army Weapon System program. It’s a veritable rabbit-warren of bureaucratic complexity and confusing interdependencies. That’s just our org chart. I haven’t mentioned the WBS down to Level 4 yet. I state this not to brag, but more to clarify the fact that I get ObamaCare missing by a small margin. It was destined to have a bug or three in the vacuum tubes* even if the guys in charge of implementing it were as good as they bragged about being. What scares me are two aspects of this.
1) They didn’t miss by a wee-smidge. They missed the way Ayn Rand’s caricaturized failure characters missed towards the end of Atlas Shrugged.
2) The Obama Administration handled the development and its consequent failure in a way that no long-tenured professional would ever have handled it. They set themselves up to fail in both their contracting and their administration, they ignored adverse data that could have saved their rear-ends, they did none of the risk reduction that major acquisition projects require to insure success and they have no viable off-ramp or plan B to salvage this mess before the February 15th Individual Mandate Witching Hour.
Pace Point Number 1: Megan McArdle gives us a good bomb damage assessment. I need not say much more than this."...
The primary goal of the ACA is for others to have control over where the money will flow. That part will work.
The fact that the computer program has issues will not matter except to increase the expense and make a point of how hard it will be to shift to another program in the future.
In the end the failure of this launch will only make it EVEN HARDER to get universal care, you know the BS stated goal for why the supporters love a give away to the insurance industry and govt execs. But all that failed was the website launch and the initial sign up. The part where most Americans will put their money where the govt told them to will work just fine.
