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Healthcare.gov: Is this failure a warning of what’s to come?

Politicians

English: President Barack Obama's signature on...
English: President Barack Obama’s signature on the health insurance reform bill at the White House, March 23, 2010. The President signed the bill with 22 different pens. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The official launch of online registration for government healthcare has been rife with disastrous glitches from the very beginning. This cataclysmic failure has spurred severe service outages across the country, and this chronically dysfunctional interface serves as foreshadowing for an epidemic of systematic organizational deficiencies. Healthcare.gov is only the first in a series of planned bureaucratic catastrophes.

Luckily, this informative overview exists to demystify the overly complex world of the medical legislation informally known as Obamacare. Being armed with the facts provided below can protect anyone during these times of economic uncertainty in which the destabilizing influence of expensive health treatments can suddenly arise.

The Internet Errors

The requirement of preemptive registration resulted in a complete system crash. The ability to input health data was also starkly limited. Security issues also seemed evident as certificates failed to show updated validations, and there was no indication of where confidential information would be stored.

Lack of Foresight and Oversight

The decision to mandate initial registration was a hastily made last-minute change that failed to consider the magnitude of public interest. This unfortunately coincided with a government shutdown, which left limited federal resources available to respond to claims of malfunctioning servers. The biggest mistake made by the Department of Health and Human Services was underestimating the massive influx of uninsured applicants.

To further complicate woes, a chief contractor behind the layout of healthcare.gov is expected to testify that additional time and money could not have salvaged the doomed enlistment effort. His official testimony will shed light on administrative laziness, and the legislative committee is expected to issue serious reprimands, but nothing will recompense the thousands of individuals deprived access to healthcare registration on the date promised to them years in advance. These problems were completely avoidable, but the team in place refused to promptly pay attention.

Proposed Solutions

The Obama Administration has conveniently remained mum on the topic of minor adjustments to the healthcare law, but Congressional Democrats have proposed implementing small delays to the overall roll-out. The dates for enforcing the individual mandate have become a focal point of discussions to modify Obamacare. Because citizens were not given feasible access to the online enrollment system, it would be unconstitutional to levy fines for their lack of registration.

The Foreboding Warning

If politicians cannot even tackle basic website programming, then they should not be trusted to manage the well-being of millions of Americans. Partisan divisions have made two factions that are fully noncoalescent, which means all future fixes will be the result of an incomplete compromise between two warring parties. Real health concerns have been forgotten by the incessant squabbling of politicians in their ivory towers. This means that every new initiative will only cause further societal strife and struggle. Members of Congress have expanded the breadth of their authority without grasping the technological realm. As a consequence, these politicians will continue overextending the limits of their power, and the public will be left to pick up the pieces.

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Decluttering the House – April 30 Day Project Update

Life

My 30 Day Project for April is to declutter my entire house.   That’s every room, every dresser, every drawer. We’ve got 12 years of jointly accumulated clutter.

Our progress so far has been wonderful.   The main level of our house is almost done.

In our daughters’ room, we put in bunk beds and pulled out a dresser.   With the crib, changing table, and toddler bed removed, they actually have room to play on the floor.  Their closet has been emptied and repurposed as scrapbooking and blanket storage.  Cost: $140 for the bunk beds.

Our son’s room has had a dresser, a desk, and a bed replaced with a loft bed.   Even with the 6 foot tall monstrosity of a bed, his room looks so much bigger.    We still have to clean out his closet, which is mostly artifacts of a business we no longer have, leftovers from when his bedroom was our office.  Cost: $260 for the loft bed.

Our room was depressing. Never dirty, but oh-so-full.   The closet was jam-packed.  The top shelf was full of towels and sheets.   The closet rod couldn’t fit another shirt.   There was a modular shelving system on the floor of the closet–full.  We had three full dressers.   The headboard has 5 foot tall cabinets, half of which were full of makeup and jewelry, the other half with books.   Now, there is 1 empty dresser.   It belonged to my great-grandmother, so it’s going to the shop to be refinished, instead of the garage sale to be sold.   Another dresser has spare room in it.   There’s no need to rearrange the cabinets to get to anything.    The closet is less than half full and there is almost nothing on the floor of the closet.   Gear for my side-line business is stored out of sight and out of the way.  This is so much more relaxing.

We’ve tackled the kitchen, except for 1 cabinet, which is mostly cookbooks and booze.   That will be fun to clean out.

Our front closet was worthless.   It was so full we put hooks on the outside of the door to hang our coats.   We pulled out a dozen coats we never wear.   At least 20 pairs of shoes, some belonging to roommates gone 1o years.   We can actually use the closet now. The shoes and boots all have homes.  Our coats all fit…inside.

We have 1 closet and 1 cabinet left to address on the main level.   There are also 3 small rooms in the basement that need to be gutted–the laundry room, the family room, and a room that has been designated for storage and the litter box.    The last one will be the hardest.    It’s full of remnants of hobbies past and failed ventures.   I’m expecting some fights, flowing every possible direction.

In the process, we’ve filled our dining room with stuff for our garage sale…twice.   It’s all getting priced and boxed as we go through it.   We thrown away anything we won’t be able to sell.   We’ve done all of this with the mutual understanding that nothing is coming back in the house.  After the sale, it will be donated or sold on Craigslist, but it won’t become a part of our lives again.   We are successfully purging so much.    The “skinny clothes” are gone.   When the time comes, they’ll be replaced.  In the meantime, they can be put to better use on someone else.   Hobbies that never took, games that are never played, it’s all going.    We are getting down to the things that are actually used and useful.

It’s interesting to note that the process is getting easier as the month goes by.     My Mother-in-Law is a hoarder.    Those habits get passed down, but what was originally a source of stress has turned into a pleasant chore.

The most wonderful discovery of all?  It turns out we don’t need a better storage system, we just need less stuff.

Update:  This post has been included in the Money Hacks Carnival.

Side Hustle: The Garage Sale Preparation

Finance

We had a garage sale last week, as a wrap-up to the April 30 Day Project.  We got rained out halfway through the first day of our 3-day sale, but we still managed to clear $1500.  We held the sale in our neighbor’s garage because it had more space and better visibility.

Wednesday night, while carrying boxes over, I missed the step to their property from our driveway and crashed while carrying three boxes.   That’s a twisted ankle and a bleeding knee.  Naturally, while I’m hopping and swearing, everyone is concerned that I’m okay.   The worry-warts.   Anyway, it hurt, so we stopped setting up while we still had a few boxes left in the basement.

[ad name=”inlineleft”]Thursday morning, I decided to show them all.   At 5:30AM, before anybody else is strongly considering the possibility of maybe thinking about getting ready to hit the snooze button, I decided to get the rest of the boxes ready.   They’d all wake up, worried about how I’m feeling, asking if I’m to stiff to carry boxes.  The best way to show them they don’t need to worry would be to have all of the boxes dealt with before they woke up.   So I started.    Up and down the stairs, with a stiff, twisted ankle, gloating to myself about how tough I was…BOOM, down the stairs. I was on my back, sliding down the stairs.    I caught a stair-tread in the small of my back and another on the point of my tailbone.  Mommy?

After I stopped twitching on the floor at the base of the stairs, I managed to get the last of the boxes ready.   Instead of sympathy, I spent the rest of the weekend getting asked if I needed an inflatable doughnut to sit on.  There are places I’d prefer not to have bruised.

Unpacking the boxes made me glad that everything was priced.  We spent 6 weeks going through our entire house–every room, every dresser, every drawer–to eliminate the clutter.   As something went into a box, it got priced, so we didn’t have to do it all at the last minute.  That is the most important time-saving step for a garage sale.   Price it as you pack it. You don’t want to waste hours pricing stuff while tripping over potential customers.

Another preparation tip to do early:  Find tables!   Ask around. You’d be surprised at who has a dozen folding tables collecting dust in his basement.    It’s better to borrow that to rent.    The best price I found was $17.50 to rent an 8′ X 30″ table for a week.   We didn’t have to do that, but we thought we would have to.  I borrowed a few, found a few, and built a few out of sawhorses.

The week before the sale, we placed an ad in the paper. When I placed the ad, the paper called to suggest we change it from running the weekend before to running just the days of the sale.   I agreed, to a point, but their Sunday circulation is miles ahead of the weekday circulation, so why pay to run an ad nobody will see on Thursday?    I ran it Sunday through Tuesday, because I wanted the Sunday ad and we got 3 consecutive days in the price.   Did I actually know better than the paper’s sales-weasel?  Who knows?   I think I made the right decision.

The Sunday before the sale, I posted an ad on Craigslist. Interesting fact: little old ladies use Craiglist to plan their garage-sale adventures.

Two days before the sale, we made signs. Bright pink signs with brighter yellow starbursts. They were all simple. “Mega Sale! 8-5” followed by an arrow and our address. Simple, easy-to-read, and bright. The morning of the sale, after the ibuprofen kicked in, I put the signs up. When you make signs out of paper, always include a crossbar. It rained a lot the first day of the sale, so the signs wilted. The second morning, I went out with some duct tape and crossbars and fixed them all.

The day before the sale, we got cash and change. We had $50 in 1s and 5s and $25 in silver change. No pennies. Nothing was priced to make us need them.

The morning of the sale, we set up two canopy tents in the driveway and pulled the prepared-and-filled table out under them. We finished stacking as much as we could on the tables and called it “open”. There were a few boxes we couldn’t put out due to the rain. We simply ran our of room. At noon, $65 into the sale, we decided enough was enough and shut down–cold, wet, and miserable. Lunch and a nap made the day better.

Later, I’ll discuss the other parts of our successful sale.

Note: The entire series is contained in the Garage Sale Manual on the sidebar.

Update: This post has been included in the Money Hacks Carnival.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-17

Misc

  • RT @mymoneyshrugged: The government breaks your leg, and hands you a crutch saying "see without me, you couldn't walk." #
  • @bargainr What weeks do you need a FoF host for? in reply to bargainr #
  • Awesome tagline: The coolest you'll look pooping your pants. Yay, @Huggies! #
  • A textbook is not the real world. Not all business management professors understand marketing. #
  • RT @thegoodhuman: Walden on work "spending best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy (cont) http://tl.gd/2gugo6 #

Work at Home Scams

Finance, Life

The idea of working from home is certainly appealing.  You get to set your own hours, sleep in some days, and be there when the kids get home from school.  You can be there when the packages get delivered and let the dog out before it’s too late.  Who doesn’t see the attraction?

Unfortunately, when something is so enticing, there will always be predators looking to take advantage of the dreams of others.  They dangle the “be your own boss” bait and reel in the people who their wishes overrule their judgment.

The ads are hard to resist.  “Make $2800 per month without leaving your home!” or “Stuff envelopes in your home for $1 per envelopes.”  I cases like these, the old saw tends to hold true: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Common work-at-home scams include:

Medical Billing

For only $499.99, you can purchase a “business opportunity”.  A lot of medical bill is actually done on paper so there is very real market for medical billing and processing.  Unfortunately for the respondents to these ads, the vast majority of this market is already taken by large companies with huge marketing budgets.  Finding enough customer to generate enough revenue to recover your investment is almost impossible, but you’ll never see that in an ad.

Envelope Stuffing

You answer an ad in the paper, sending $29.95 for a packet that will instruct you in the fine art of stuffing envelopes for $1 each.  When you get the information, you find out it is a letter instructing you to place an ad in the papers stating “Stuff Envelopes for $1 Each.  $29.95 for Information.”  This forces you to become the scammer, just to recover your costs.  Bad you.

Assembly or Craft Work

This one actually sounds like a business.  You invest in–for example–a sign-making machine for $1500.  The selling company promises to buy a quota  of signs from you each month.  After you buy the equipment and materials you spend countless hours making the product only to find out that either a) the company has disappeared or b) their undefined “Quality Standards” has rejected the work.  Nothing is ever up to standards.

That’s not to say there aren’t legitimate opportunities to make money at home.  Bob at Christian Personal Finance recently listed 24 legitimate home-based businesses, including blogging, eBay selling, wedding planning, car mechanic, and mobile oil changes.

Are you exploring any home-based business opportunities?