Why Trust the Gov’t With Insurance When It Can’t Even Create a Freaking Website That Works?
It’s a simple question, really.
Healthcare.gov and its astounding 500 million lines of code has had a few, how shall we say, glitches.
People can’t even log on. When they do, they find the wrong information
about the healthcare they’re supposed to be buying. The whole site is
dedicated to one thing, and the information about that one thing isn’t
even factually correct.
But that’s not all. The site also times out. It gives confusing error messages. People have been duplicate enrolled (when they actually get enrolled that is, which apparently takes an amount of time somewhere between ‘hours and hours’ and ‘never’). Some data fields are completely missing. The system reports spouses as children. Some of the calculators on the site don’t even work. A calculator. Something that has been around in electronic form since the 1960s…
Yet, millions of dollars went into the new healthcare exchange site. MillionS with an “S”. As in plural. More than one. Actually, more than a hundred of them.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the whole shebang may have cost the American taxpayers $600 million dollars to implement:
Now, let’s go ahead and add that to the fact that they didn’t even spend that money to write all of their own code, but instead, they reportedly “borrowed” some of the code (read: pirated) from a UK company:
So the question, again, becomes:
More importantly, after millions of dollars and several years of development, is it even possible to screw up something as potentially simple as a website this horribly bad and do it completely on accident?
Not believably.
So what is the ultimate goal of Obamacare, anyway?
Well, according to Senator Harry Reid, Obamacare is a stepping stone to pushing America into a socialist single-payer system where the government controls the one and only funding mechanism for all healthcare, something that’s been on the agenda for decades but has never received much Congressional support (and definitely not enough to get it passed).
When recently asked directly if Obamacare was secretly a step to moving America to that system, Reid’s reply was “Yes, yes. Absolutely, yes.” So not just one ‘yes’ there. Several yesses. And an ‘absolutely’.
You might say that’s not such a big deal. America’s healthcare would simply be like that of Canada or the UK. Taxes might go up, sure, but at least everyone would be covered, no questions asked, right?
Well then answer these questions: Do you like being able to make your own choices about your healthcare? What tests you get? What treatments you take?
Good luck with any of that under an American single-payer system.Don’t forget, controlling the funding mechanism means so called cost-saving preventative health care will definitely be part of the bargain. Factor in the fact that America is home to a $359 billion-dollar pharmaceutical industry that spends over $100 million lobbying Congress every year. Don’t forget, the U.S. also has the most aggressive vaccine schedule in the entire world.
Consider recent news reports of the government literally forcing people to take their “cures” — the most recent example involves a 10-year-old Amish girl whose parents turned to homeopathic medicine for their daughter’s leukemia but an appeals court has usurped the parent’s rights and forced the little girl to take chemotherapy treatments instead.
It was founding father Thomas Jefferson who said, “A government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have.”
But, perhaps a more appropriate quote in this instance would be one from Fabian Socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw:
The failures of this catastrophic dip into government-mediated healthcare exchanges through private companies is but a stepping stone to a completely government-run socialist healthcare system.
By the way, if you think the government is about to stop with simply nationalizing healthcare — that it won’t move on to energy, banking, education, agriculture, housing, etc. etc. etc. et al. — then healthcare.gov has some health insurance to sell you…
Once the website works, that is.
But that’s not all. The site also times out. It gives confusing error messages. People have been duplicate enrolled (when they actually get enrolled that is, which apparently takes an amount of time somewhere between ‘hours and hours’ and ‘never’). Some data fields are completely missing. The system reports spouses as children. Some of the calculators on the site don’t even work. A calculator. Something that has been around in electronic form since the 1960s…
Yet, millions of dollars went into the new healthcare exchange site. MillionS with an “S”. As in plural. More than one. Actually, more than a hundred of them.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the whole shebang may have cost the American taxpayers $600 million dollars to implement:
So the government took more money than most people will ever see in their entire lifetimes and handed it over to a whole team of techies and, somehow, they can’t even make a simple website function at even the most basic level?If users found a few bugs in their iPads, [Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services] argued, most wouldn’t consider them a complete disaster. Instead, they would recognize that technology is complicated, that errors are common, and they would wait for an update. Apple Inc., she added, has “a few more resources” than her department, so “hopefully [citizens will] give us the same slack they give Apple.”
That argument is as clueless as it is misleading. While it’s true that Apple is fantastically wealthy, its product-development costs aren’t necessarily greater than those of the federal government. As Fred Vogelstein reports in his coming book, Apple spent about $150 million developing the iPhone. The health-insurance exchange—which, let’s remember, is merely a website meant to connect citizens to insurance companies, something quite a bit less complex than Apple’s groundbreaking miniature computer—so far has cost at least $360 million, and possibly as much as $600 million.
Now, let’s go ahead and add that to the fact that they didn’t even spend that money to write all of their own code, but instead, they reportedly “borrowed” some of the code (read: pirated) from a UK company:
Let’s be honest here. When is the last time the government even did something that was generally recognized as a smashing success anyway? Can you remember a time?The computer code that was stolen is called DataTables, and it is exclusively provided under a GPL v2 license which requires anyone who uses the software code to keep the copyright notice visible in the code itself. This allows the original author of the code to receive attribution for creating it.
An analysis of the code running Healthcare.gov reveals that the Obamacare development team maliciously removed the copyright notice and credit attributions from the code while copying and using the rest of the code. In the field of journalism, this would be called “plagiarism.” In the field of computer software, it’s called “piracy” according to the U.S. government. (source w/ screen capture of code comparisons)
So the question, again, becomes:
WHY SHOULD WE TRUST THE GOVERNMENT TO MANAGE HEALTH INSURANCE WHEN IT CANNOT EVEN CREATE A BASIC FUNCTIONING WEBSITE?
I mean, at this point, most Americans wouldn’t pay the government $5 to make a noodle salad.More importantly, after millions of dollars and several years of development, is it even possible to screw up something as potentially simple as a website this horribly bad and do it completely on accident?
Not believably.
So what is the ultimate goal of Obamacare, anyway?
Well, according to Senator Harry Reid, Obamacare is a stepping stone to pushing America into a socialist single-payer system where the government controls the one and only funding mechanism for all healthcare, something that’s been on the agenda for decades but has never received much Congressional support (and definitely not enough to get it passed).
When recently asked directly if Obamacare was secretly a step to moving America to that system, Reid’s reply was “Yes, yes. Absolutely, yes.” So not just one ‘yes’ there. Several yesses. And an ‘absolutely’.
You might say that’s not such a big deal. America’s healthcare would simply be like that of Canada or the UK. Taxes might go up, sure, but at least everyone would be covered, no questions asked, right?
Well then answer these questions: Do you like being able to make your own choices about your healthcare? What tests you get? What treatments you take?
Good luck with any of that under an American single-payer system.Don’t forget, controlling the funding mechanism means so called cost-saving preventative health care will definitely be part of the bargain. Factor in the fact that America is home to a $359 billion-dollar pharmaceutical industry that spends over $100 million lobbying Congress every year. Don’t forget, the U.S. also has the most aggressive vaccine schedule in the entire world.
Consider recent news reports of the government literally forcing people to take their “cures” — the most recent example involves a 10-year-old Amish girl whose parents turned to homeopathic medicine for their daughter’s leukemia but an appeals court has usurped the parent’s rights and forced the little girl to take chemotherapy treatments instead.
It was founding father Thomas Jefferson who said, “A government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have.”
But, perhaps a more appropriate quote in this instance would be one from Fabian Socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw:
Obama has been accused of being a Fabian Socialist. Here’s what Forbes Contributor Jerry Bowyer wrote in November 2008, nearly a year before Obamacare was first introduced:“Under Socialism, you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you liked it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character and industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live, you would have to live well.”
Does any of this sound even the tiniest bit familiar?So here is the playbook: The left will identify, freeze, personalize and polarize an industry, probably health care. It will attempt to nationalize one-fifth of the U.S. economy through legislative action. They will focus, as Lenin did, on the “commanding heights” of the economy, not the little guy.
As Obama said, “the smallest” businesses will be exempt from fines for not “doing the right thing” in offering employer-based health care coverage. Health will not be nationalized in one fell swoop; they have been studying the failures of Hillary Care. Instead, a parallel system will be created, funded by surcharges on business payroll, which will be superior to many private plans.
The old system will be forced to subsidize the new system and there will be a gradual shift from the former to the latter. The only coercion will be the fines, not the participation.
The failures of this catastrophic dip into government-mediated healthcare exchanges through private companies is but a stepping stone to a completely government-run socialist healthcare system.
By the way, if you think the government is about to stop with simply nationalizing healthcare — that it won’t move on to energy, banking, education, agriculture, housing, etc. etc. etc. et al. — then healthcare.gov has some health insurance to sell you…
Once the website works, that is.
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