St Croix River Road Ramblings

Welcome to River Road Ramblings.

Sunday, October 6, 2013

Affordable Health Care

Having spent most of my career working in the healthcare industry and experienced with much of what is happening with the Obamacare rollout, I am adding my opinion here. I am biased, as I am in favor of something being done rather than leaving things as they were before Obamacare.  I do think it will need changes as things evolve. 

Republicans are enthused about the computer glitches with the opening of Obamacare--part of their desperate hopes it will fail and are bragging that few people have signed up for insurance yet.  They continue to shut down the govt to try to force a roll-back of affordable health care for fear that it will work.  

 Democrats are pleased that 7 million people have already gone online to find out more about affordable insurance.  They also do not expect folks to sign up without a few weeks of consideration and comparison shopping.  

  A real test of Obamacare is to let it happen and if it doesn't work, then fix it.  If you really don't like it, then win an election so you can roll it back--don't just throw a tantrum. 

 As a retired computer systems person, I am impressed any computer site that has 7 million users in the first 3 days has been working at all.  We always tested things and then rolled it out and spent the next few weeks 24x7 fixing the problems as they arose with heavy use--something you really can't test for.  Remember, most of the computer systems were built by private businesses contracted to do this for the government--not by government programmers themselves, so the finger pointing is really at private companies.   


Anyone who works in highly computerized industry learns to be wary of doing things on Mondays--as we programmers role out our changes over the weekend and they get the real user test on Monday!  And they are always particularly nervous about a brand new roll-out, just as we are with a new version of our computer programs.

  The good thing is that the fixes are generally quickly done; the bottlenecks figured out and things smooth out soon.  That is what is happening with the ACA roll out of exchanges.