Henry Chao: 30-40% of Healthcare.gov Still Remains to be Built

Incredible.

If you're keeping track, that means that the site is only 30-40% away from working nearly 80% of the time.

Apparently this was not in his opening remarks, but had to be questioned out of him.

REP. CORY GARDNER: Well how much do we have to build today, still? What do we need to build? 50 percent? 40 percent? 30 percent?

HENRY CHAO: I think it's, uh, just an approximation, we're probably sitting somewhere between 60 and 70 percent because we still have to build...

GARDNER: Wait, 60 or 70 percent that needs to be built, still?

CHAO: Because we still have to build the payment systems to make payments to insurers in January.

GARDNER: Let me get this correct. Sixty to 70 percent of Healthcare.gov still needs to be built?

CHAO: It's not really about Healthcare.gov -- it's the federally-facilitated marketplace.

GARDNER: The entire system that the American people are being required to rely upon...

CHAO: Healthcare.gov -- the online application, verification, determination, plan compare, getting enrolled, generating the enrollment transaction -- that's 100 percent there.

Oh, you mean the colors, pictures, and fonts are 100% there. Wonderful. Thanks, Julia.

30-40% of the building still has to be done, including the payment system, which is crucial, because, see, without a payment system, you can't actually purchase insurance.

They've got 11 days to build 30-40% of the site, after not being able to do so after 3 1/2 years. And then, after they've built the remaining 30-40%, they expect, best case scenario, to have it working for 80% of users.

If this were an eighties comedy, we'd have a montage, and the group's screw-up would propose some wild out-of-the-box solution that just might work! And then it would.

But this is real life, alas.

Even assuming they manage this, which, based on their history of stumblefuck bumbling and hapless pratfall incompetence, they won't -- What An Adventure it will be to enter your credit card information into Obama's website!

It'll be like your own Hollywood thriller.

The website at the center of U.S. President Barack Obama's healthcare overhaul has security flaws that put user data at "critical risk" despite recent government assurances it is safe to use, a respected security expert said on Tuesday.

"There are actual, live vulnerabilities on the site now," David Kennedy, head of computer security consulting firm TrustedSec LLC, told Reuters before testifying at a congressional hearing on the topic "Is My Data on HealthCare.gov Secure?"

Kennedy, a former U.S. Marine Corps cyber-intelligence analyst, presented a 17-page report describing the problems to the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. It does not go into specifics in some areas, he said, because that could provide criminals with a blueprint for launching attacks.

...

"There is a lot of stuff that we are not publicly disclosing because of the criticality of the findings," Kennedy said. "We don't want to hurt people."

When asked to describe the severity of the threat that they posed to the public, he said it was a "critical risk."

See, what did I tell you? Sign up for Obamacare and star in your very own personalized Hollywood Identity Theft thriller: Critical Risk. Coming to a bank account near you.

Corrected: Chao later seems to correct himself, saying that 30-40% remains to be built, and 60-70% has been built. I guess maybe he got his numbers backwards. I'm not 100% sure but I'm changing it for now.

posted by Ace at 01:11 PM

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