70% complete? Haven’t these guys heard about the last 10%? Obamacare Needs a Drop-Dead Date – Megan McArdle – Bloomberg.
— One person familiar with the project says it’s only about 70 percent of the way there, and has heard estimates of somewhere between two weeks to two months to fix it. As a programmer I know points out, “two weeks to two months” is the programming equivalent of “40 days and 40 nights”: “A long time, but I have no way of knowing how long.” When I used to hear estimates like that, I used to assume it would be coming in on the late end of that range, earliest.
If this is true, it simply will not work in time. No way, no how.
Megan presents damning evidence of systemic failure and misleading the public, key figures in HHS and politicians. She goes on to conclude…
In the private sector, this system would already have been rolled back, probably less than 48 hours after it was rolled out. The government has more time, but not that much more, because every day they wait adds to the chaos that will occur if they have to pull the plug in December. If the system cannot reliably process 50 percent of its users on Nov. 1 — and I mean from end to end, including sending a valid enrollment file to the insurer — then the administration should ask for a one-year delay of Obamacare’s various regulations, including the individual mandate. Congress, including Republicans, should be ready to give it to them, with no strings attached.
Perhaps Nov. 1 seems too aggressive to you. I chose that date because it’s when Jon Kingsdale, who ran the Massachusetts exchange for its first five years, said we would be “really in deep doo-doo.” Well, let’s say Nov. 15 — the date when almost all the experts I’ve heard say we really need to be running at full speed, to handle the crush of applications sure to come between Thanksgiving and the mid-December deadline for buying insurance that starts in January.
Whatever it is, that date needs to be set now. Otherwise the political temptation will be — as it clearly has been all along — to declare that everything’s fine and we should keep going just in case it all works out in the end. The administration’s desire to avoid a giant political embarrassment is entirely understandable. But the rest of us have an even deeper and more important interest in a functioning market for health insurance.
Getting back to the last 10%. That’s what makes a project a success and it takes 50% of the time. Heck, according to Wikipedia (above link), it’s worse than that….
“The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.”
—Tom Cargill, Bell Labs
So lets take a look at the anatomy of healthcare.gov, the Federal Obamacare exchange…
So far we know it gets a failing grade regarding the web interface to the public. It is also widely documented that for the few who have signed up, the information delivered to the health insurance companies is only partially complete at best. What about all the other functions shown in the graph above? Are they working at 70%, 90% or 100%?
If they aren’t above 90%, there’s no way in hell the exchange will be functional by either November 1st or November 15th.
h/t to Scott Johnson at Powerline who also has a good analysis of Megan’s article.
From the comments section…
Megan, great article. Every American should read it.
I managed three major multi million dollar government software development programs – one in the government and two as a contractor. If the government delayed issuing their requirements until 7 months before required launch, it’s already dead.
You can’t throw money at it and hire more programmers because increasing the number of programmers increases the necessary communications between them. (Too many cooks.) When the coding is done, you should have half your budget and half your schedule still remaining. There are unknown unknowns lurking inside the code.
Next October is probably an optimistic get well date.
