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!
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!
