SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK
I figured
it out – I figured out what’s wrong with the Obamacare website!
Not that I
can fix it … let’s not get silly.
I got the
idea from Star Trek. Specifically,
from some dialogue in the movie Star Trek
V: The Final Frontier. This is the one where Kirk and Spock sing campfire
songs and fight God. Hm … there could be more government jokes in there,
somewhere.
Anyway,
here are the lines that got my attention:
Captain
Kirk: “You told me you could get this ship operational in two weeks, I gave
you three, what happened?”
Engineer Scott: “I think you gave me TOO
much time, Captain.”
See, it’s
funny because … never mind. Although it might be the funniest moment of the
movie, unless you count the unintentional laughs.
I pondered
this when I realized the government had three and a half years to get the
Obamacare website up and running. At the rate it was budgeted, that’s
$2,230,952 a month. That’s more than my Mountain Dew and chocolate budget
combined. So, maybe we just gave them too much time?
The
taxpayers have forked over (so far) half a billion dollars for the website,
which was budgeted at $93.7 million, so maybe we also gave them too much money.
Other sources say that $500 million number is inaccurate, and it really cost only
$394 million to build the site itself.
Wait.
Only?
My wife
built our website for free. Granted, we didn’t require fifty million people to
sign up on it or else, but she also didn’t go over budget by three hundred
million bucks.
Meanwhile,
no matter what the actual cost, we’re now hearing that 500 million lines of
code in the website design are wrong. They’ll have to be re-written. That’s one
line for each American citizen, with enough left over, if the lines were
dollars, for half our pets to get cat scans.
I went to
the website to get an idea of what we were paying for, but, well … it was down.
“What we
have here is the perfect storm in software development,” said software expert
James Turner.
Ha! So the
Federal government can make something
perfect!
Meanwhile,
a recent poll indicated that 56% of Americans are losing their faith in the
Affordable Care Act. Think about that. That’s absolutely amazing. Almost half
of Americans still have faith in
Obamacare.
If any
private business had started up with such a disaster, the only thing we’d be
talking about is how things would go in bankruptcy court. Alas, the feds have
cooked the books so they can’t go bankrupt, except morally.
Is it any
wonder that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the person
put in charge of the Obamacare rollout, fled Washington when Congress first tried
to haul her in to testify? Scheduling conflicts. Among other things, it seems
she had to appear on a TV show, instead. (In her defense, Jon Stewart is way
more exciting than any Congressional hearing.) In today’s Washington the buck
doesn’t stop here, no matter how many bucks are involved.
(By the
way, a web developer friend of mine, who knows her stuff, told me three and a
half years was too little time for
this project. Is that not something someone should have decided on before
setting the legal deadlines?)
Well, it’s
not like Sebelius has to answer to Congress or, according to her, anyone but
President Obama. At least, that’s what she said. She also said the people
calling for her to resign are “people who I don’t work for” …
You know, people
like Congressmen, who are elected. In other words, Sebelius is saying she
doesn’t work for the voter, or the taxpayer. You know. The people.
Can’t blame
her for not realizing the government is supposed to work for the people … very
few people inside the Beltway know that.
So how do
we handle this problem? We shouldn’t just complain; we should work to fix it.
So here’s my idea:
We ditch
the website entirely, and go back to paper and pens, or maybe manual
typewriters. This would, of course, require hiring tens of thousands of people
to process all that paperwork. We hire those people to do the job, and give
them benefits including—wait for it—health insurance.
Half the
problem’s solved already.
Then,
because the taxpayers can’t afford the Federal employees we’re already paying,
we fire two people in the bureaucracy for each new one that’s hired. We start
with Kathleen Sebelius, then everyone involved in building that website. (That unsolves half the problem, but helps
solve another one.)
Then we
hire my wife to design them a basic website that just gives people information
on how things work rather than having them sign up through it. We pay her just
$25 million to do it, thus saving $369 million, or maybe $475 million—not that
a million here or there is a big deal. I can help with the changeover—I already
own a manual typewriter.
Just don’t give her too much time.
It is the sort of thing that leaves one no alternative but to do a hearty facepalm.
ReplyDeleteAh -- that explains how I got this migraine ....
DeleteListen to this, my hubby went on the website and started the grueling process of sugning us up. When he got to our citizenship, which my hubby is both American and Isreali, they want me to prove my citizenship. And I was born in the states. And my dad was in the Navy at the time of my birth.
ReplyDeleteAn extra irony: this is the same administration that's fighting against requiring photo ID's to vote. *sigh*
Delete