Grumpa Joe's Place

Cray X-MP/24 (serial no. 115) used by NSA (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The National Security Agency (Photo credit: @mjb)

The Edison bulb lit up over my head again while Peg and I were having our pork chop. I think the Smoking Loon Merlot had something to do with it. The Obama Care sign up website has been bothering me ever since it became clear that the site is worse than any hurricane that has hit North America. One question keeps coming into mind, how can the world’s most powerful country be so stupid as to allow a software program bring them down? We are the world’s software experts. Our computer scientists are known worldwide for their ability, yet we introduce software that will control one sixth of the US economy that is a pile of cow dung. “A few glitches” O said. It is becoming apparent as the days roll by that the glitches are major screw ups in the architecture. He will never admit it but he owns this one. There is no way to blame it on Bush or the Republicans.

The engineer in me has been working overtime to figure out what I would have done differently. The problem with this type of analysis is that I have the benefit of the Monday morning quarter back. Nevertheless, I began analyzing what I would do. The first thing is I’d hire my brainiac son who is a computer scientist. He works on huge financial analysis software and is known for his ability to test the living crap out of his programs before they go on-line. The problem is that he won’t take the job because he is more conservative than I am, and he would rather see the big O flushed down the toilet.

Any software needed to do this job has to perform fast, and must handle terabytes of information. Hmmmn, where have I heard that before? Yes, the NSA does exactly that. They monitor billions of phone call, e-mails, and video cameras daily. They respond quickly at the command of the Big O. They have a complex of buildings in Utah to house their new computers designed to handle the load with capacity for the future. Those are the guys, I will call to consult on this problem.

How is it possible that the huge government of over educated liberals failed to see the NSA as a contractor for the health care program? They would most likely handle it like a kiddy game compared to the work they do spying on us.

All I can come up with is that the NSA is the NSA, and Health Care is Health Care and never shall the two bureaucrat organizations meet to coöperate with each other and make synergy happen. The number one problem we have is a government that is too large, second, we give the government too much money, and three, we propagate bureaucratic empires.

After World War II the Japanese government was broke; their economy starved for cash. We didn’t help them because we didn’t want them to rebuild their war machine. Yet, by the nineteen eighties the Japanese auto industry started a war against the US big three and they won commercially. How did they do it? They didn’t have cash to invest extravagantly like GM, Ford, and Chrysler, in fact they had but a shoe string budget to invest. Today, the Japs make the best cars in the world.

Necessity made the Japs think outside the box, they worked with their government in a positive way. Japanese engineers came up with ingenious ways to make things with limited stamping presses and tooling. The government handled a plan to protect their markets while attacking the US market. The engineers stole an idea from the progressive die makers and applied it to making auto body parts. Our guys in America thought it was a stupid idea and laughed them off. The result was a car body made in Japan with superior fit and minimal assembly. They were also smart enough to hire an US quality control consultant who taught them the basics of just in time manufacturing. The US auto industry controlled by the UAW unions were too stupid to see the value of the process.

What does this have to do with Obama Care? The point I am making is that attacking the problem with a team and a very specific well-defined goal would have resulted in a superior roll out experience and Obama would have signed up 2.5 million people on day one.  The health care software didn’t need tons of money to reach the goal, but it will to fix it. We need a do over.

Related articles

• ObamaCare… And So It Begins: Exchange Leaks Private Information of 2,400 People in Minnesota (askmarion.wordpress.com)
• Insurers, others say ‘Obamacare’ glitches fixable (kansascity.com)
• Insurers, health policy experts say Obamacare glitches are fixable (crainsdetroit.com)
• The ObamaCare letdown (Www.humanevents.com)
• Health law glitches: fatal or fleeting? (kansascity.com)
• Questionable design blamed for health website woes (kansascity.com)

Filed under: Conservative, economy, Government, health care | Tagged: Barack Obama, health, Jap, Japan, National Security Agency, NSA, Obama, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, United States, World War II | Leave a comment »