Discussion: Sebelius Describes 'Most Terrifying' Moment During Obamacare Launch

Discussion for article #224012

ā€œI think probably the most terrifying couple of days were Nov. 29 and 30 when I realized my Presidential ambitions were toast.ā€

She was a terrible appointment.

That group of management experts and techies who fixed the site are heroes.

Obama owes them a shit ton.

I didnā€™t recall that there was anything magical about Dec. 1, just that the site steadily improved and was generally usable by then.

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If the worst someone can say about the ACA is that the initial roll-out was terrible, then Iā€™d say the ACA is looking pretty damned good.

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Why? As weā€™ve seen with a few other statesā€™ problems, setting up the exchange was no easy feat.
Also, Secretary Sebelius, who formerly served as Insurance Commissioner and then Governor for the State of Kansas, helped get several Republican-led states off the fence and agree to expand Medicaid through the ā€œprivate option.ā€

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She never had presidential ambitions. Where did you pull that beauty out of

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She was not a terrible appointment.

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ā€˜ā€œBetter would have been a website that was fully functional,ā€ she said.ā€™

Actually it would have been better to use an American company (maybe even one experienced in health insurance software) with American programmers.
What did people expect when you use a company from a country that doesnā€™t have private insurance whose programmers come from a country where insurance is somewhat of a foreign concept. Add to that the Republican refusal to work with Obama, especially at the state level, where 30 exchanges had to be built instead of 5 or 6, you have a recipe for disaster. And that is exactly what they got.

I would be interested in hearing from professionals about whether there was any reasonable chance of having a fully functional rollout, and how they rate the efficacy and timeliness of the resolution of the problems with the website.

Well, I am not sure what kind of professionals you mean but I have been in tech since 86 (mostly banking and EDI software).

The most troubling thing I read about the rollout was that all the systems were not tested together. That is just unacceptable. There should have been extensive testing at both the unit level and the system level.

Also, there were probably some very rosy time estimates given by the people who bid for the project and in my experience, very few people include enough testing time.

However, I had just as much if not more trouble using the Blue Cross system to find and change plans in the past. Nobody ever seems to talk about the problems with the private insurance systems.