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What do you mean, "The computer program crashed!"?

The people who are ranting and raving about the "failure" of the computer system for the Affordable Care Act--"ObamaCare"--obviously do not know shit from Shinola about computer systems.  Anyone with any knowledge about computer systems knows that they are infernally complex, and that extremely large computer systems are guaranteed to have problems.  Whose Law was it that stated that if anything can go wrong, it will?

I am fortunately old enough to remember that every large computer system began as a disaster.  They have millions of lines of code, any one of which is capable of producing an unintended data train wreck.

Worse, the Affordable Care Act is dependent on interfacing with innumerable independent health care systems (the insurance companies), as well as huge, ancient government systems that have not had the funds or the opportunity to use the best systems we have:  they are starved of the funds needed to use the best computer technology and programming.

Because of the political belief and insistence that private companies are always better than government agencies, the Affordable Care Act is a cobbled-up "partnership" between government and for-profit companies.   The President and Congress reluctantly came to a decision to try to provide health care to everyone, or almost everyone, which has never been a priority of the insurance companies.  They, the latter, were always happy not to insure anyone who would not make money for them.
And the insurance companies demonstrated a fierce desire to siphon off as much of the money they collected as possible to line their own pockets.  They have had to be forced to use most of the money they collect for actual health care, and to cover people with pre-existing conditions, and recurring problems.  The insurance companies love wealthy clients who can pony up lots of their own money, and young people who still believe they are never going to be sick or injured.

What we really need is what we euphemistically call a "single payer" system:  Pay your taxes, if you get sick, go to a doctor, and the doctor and the hospital bill the government.  Vermont is going to try that.  I hope it works in Vermont, as it does almost everywhere in the rest of the world.  Then maybe we can really lower our health care costs.

The problem is not that the computer program crashed:  it is that we love to hate government, so we elect people to office who think the whole enterprise should be drowned in a bathtub.  

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