Hearing About Obamacare Disaster Grows Typically Partisan

Does the Affordable Care Act cover whiplash from trying to follow all the spin?

Congress's first hearing on ObamaCare's botched enrollment system immediately took on a political tone Thursday as lawmakers tangled in partisan attacks.

Inter-party sniping dominated the first several stages of the hearing as Republicans and Democrats each sought the ethical high ground on the healthcare law.

The lawmakers' statements highlight the relentlessly political nature of debates over the Affordable Care Act, particularly as the rollout's failures lead both sides to seek blame.  

Comments

[briny]

If, due to mission/specification creep that I've picked up on, they really didn't successfully test the system under full load, what makes you think that they ever bothered to do any reasonable set of security checks. Penetration-testing, fuzzing, man-in-the-middle attacks are all on my radar, at the very least. And done by a "real" independent testing firm. Frankly, I'd rather pay any fine than be in that database. At least the NSA stuff is usually safe. These yahoos? No.

[Gindjurra]

This highlights why politicians should leave the design of a complex high-tech system to the best-qualified engineers, not the pork barrel.

[briny]

Sadly, judging by the history of such projects, even the best-qualified engineers won't save you if you don't LISTEN to them. I've personally rescued a multi-million dollar project and I was having to alter nearly every database at least once a week on the fly as someone in the upper-echelons decided to re-specify the code requirements. The lesson's I learned as a teenager following IBM system-engineers around while they worked gave me the understanding of how to pull such a thing off, despite the crises happening about me. Been there, done that, burned the stupid t-shirt.