Decoding the Rollout Debacle

Decoding the Rollout Debacle

XXI

When countless colleagues have besieged your doors

And left wild traces of some User's rage,

Take heed to not translate them to remorse

Nor head off to some sorry escapades.

The force with which most often users plead

Or emphasize the justice of their cause,

Its source, most oft', of good intentions made,

Undoing which cause justice to your use.

Most chances as begot of discontent

Of others, prove best opportunities

To probe the limits of your worth; else, vent

Your umbrage at some worthless legacies:

Such are the monuments of gross incompetence,

Much shame well-hid in codes for else ill-hidden sins!

-- “In Search for Reason” {Cf. p. 140 at Flirting with Misadventures}

The histrionics ubiquitous throughout the national landscape over the so-called ObamaCare rollout debacle has been, more than anything else, clinically symptomatic of a national polity who has lost its bearings.  With the notable exception of Pat Buchanan who exhibited an exceptional semblance of equanimity amidst frenzied hysterical call for Secretary Sebelius’ head to roll as just wages for the ObamaCare logistical fiasco, Pat counseled to let her be.  I whole-heartedly concur.

Getting rid of Sec. Sebelius would only allow the administration to replace her with somebody equally as incompetent if not more so.  It would be a worse exercise in futility than re-arranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic as a countermeasure to the impending plunge into the depths.  It would not cut our (the taxpayers’) loses to a minimum because we the taxpayers still have to pay her for a pension of sorts and pay somebody else to do the job as incompetently.

As it turned out, the main contractor for the ObamaCare rollout had a long-documented history of budget overruns on under-delivered systems, as most recently documented by Mark Styne:

Their most famous government project was for the Canadian Firearms Registry. The registry was estimated to cost in total $119 million, which would be offset by $117 million in fees. That’s a net cost of $2 million. Instead, by 2004 the CBC (Canada’s PBS) was reporting costs of some $2 billion — or a thousand times more expensive.

It takes unmitigated temerity, if not utter stupidity, deemed normal for any regime of bureaucrats and government functionaries to entrust the implementation of its signature Legislative policy achievement to a company of kindred sterling reputation.  Huckleberry Finn would not entrust the repairs of his slingshot to an outfit with such a track record.  But then again, Huck Finn was not an Obama Regime apparatchik.  Rather, he was the epitome of American pragmatism. 

He was the prototypical American with skills, who “You send them into the wilderness with a pocket knife and a Q-tip and they build you a shopping mall.”  Obamism has no room for the Americanism which has served as the foundation of global American hegemony, which candidate Obama vowed to cut down to size, and Pres. Obama profusely apologized for in public, every time he found a convenient platform.

Lest we get sidetracked, it behooves to emphasize that in the canonical annals of the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC), the product owner is always the stake holder who oversees and underwrites the development.  Who ultimately ends up doing the dirty deed is a personnel decision, a matter of resource deployment and allocation.  The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) was the system owner of record at every stage of SDLC.  The choice of personnel to delegate mission critical projects to is reflective of executive managerial acumen which the Obama Regime time and again had proved to be in woeful deficit.

The fact that all levels of testing including unit, integration, regression, performance and UAT (user acceptance testing) have been established gospel in SDLC seemed to have been swept under the rugs, in an attempt to provide excuses for the rollout fiasco.  Of the above testing modalities, UAT is the most crucial.  Without it, there is no justification for any systems rollout.  Conversely, if you attempt a systems rollout, it is prima facie evidence that adequate UAT was passed with flying colors.

GIGO, an axiomatic acronym in the province of systems development, was always taken to mean, “garbage in, garbage out,” or “gospel in, gospel out,” but never “garbage in, gospel out.”  An algorithm that would effectively cleanse or purify the content from whatever inherent conceptual sins is yet to be invented.  This was largely the reason that the acolytes of Global Warming miserably failed in their attempt to fudge the data to prove that the paradigm of anthropogenic global warming was an accepted settled science. {Cf. e.g., “Consensus Does Not a Science Make,” Ch 20 pp. 263ff at Flirting with Misadventures also see, http://www.newmediajournal.us/staff/asumen/2009/11272009.htm }.

The redistributionist mechanism that is embedded in ObamaCare is precisely the kind of content garbage, the “ill-hidden sins,” that the system attempts to bury so that it is implemented unbeknownst to the user, i.e. the insurance consumers or policy holders.  In the succinct formulation of Charles Krauthammer, “. . . [The] three pillars of Obamacare: (a) mendacity, (b) paternalism and (c) subterfuge” were the sins that the insurance policy cancellations laid bare.  And, as I emphasized earlier elsewhere {Cf. p. 211 at Flirting with Misadventures}, ‘. . . President Obama is the Zen Master of “the nexus of political subterfuge so effectively employed by both Lenin and Stalin against their rivals to pull off the Bolshevik revolution.”’

In order to fix the logistics woes of the ObamaCare rollout, this nation has to fix the ideological underpinnings of the Statist Regime which mandate that the health of the citizenry should be managed by the government.  This requires cleansing the national psyche of the culture of dependency and parasitic opportunism that Obamism has perpetrated on the national polity.

This should start with garnering a veto-proof majority in the House and getting a GOP majority in the Senate.  Otherwise, it might be far easier or more politically convenient to succumb to the fatalistic resignation and comfort of surrender:

One might argue: Why get so annoyed?

Tough work to pursue, tougher still unemployed

What with inflation going up by the hour

'Tis no simple mission to get worth for your dollar.

Well, then, it is obvious, there isn't any choice;

Methinks it takes genius, takes cunning otherwise;

Some take the drudgery, all day, nine to five,

Mischief and trickery, nay, sin to survive!

-- “Worker’s Lament” {Cf. p. 171 at Flirting with Misadventures}