Freedom of the Depressed

The United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has quietly become a propaganda ministry of the Obama administration … spoon-feeding information to reporters and Congressional visitors to the camps housing this new wave of illegal immigrants. But what is depressingly outrageous is a series of restriction it imposes on them before they are allowed into these facilities, viz: 

- No recording devices will be allowed

- No questions will be allowed during the tour

- No interacting with staff and children at the shelter

- We ask that your questions be provided via email or phone after the tour to Kenneth Wolfe

- HHS ACF public affairs will provide answers to your follow up questions as quickly as    possible- We will provide photos of the facility after the tour

- There will be no on-site interviews by HHS staff before or after the tour, all inquiries go to  Kenneth Wolfe 

 These constraints are clearly in violation of the first amendment of our Constitution and the fact that most reporters and Congressmen have abided by them is discouraging beyond expression. Yes, Representative Jim Bridenstine (R., Okla.) has objected but, in my opinion, not strenuously enough. Just the fact that these visits need to be scheduled days in advance indicates the degree to which HHS is trying to stifle the information flow out of these camps … see: National Review Story. How about a little civil disobedience … anyone?

Two weeks ago I asked a series of questions about this situation that I thought needed answers … see: Death Trains. Has anyone seen even a semblance of reportage on these issues in the main stream media? This is the real tragedy that is occurring surrounding this immigration influx ... along with the fact that there is anyone defending this BS. Here is the text of the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights in our Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

In their naivete the framers of the Constitution neglected to include the Executive branch in this restrictive covenant … because of their dewy-eyed assumption that this branch was only to administer (faithfully) the laws passed by Congress. In six short years we have seen this assumption knocked into a cocked hat.

I greatly fear that we are approaching a Constitutional crisis … if not already there.

Test Pattern

I was just listening to the House of Representatives testimony from the contractors who built the Obamacare website (HealthCare.gov) that has had myriad user problems. The statement that cause me to sit up and take notice was that full system testing for this site began only two weeks before it was supposed to go live on this past October 1^st ... see: CNN Story.  Two weeks!?!

Having run two system software companies that built user interfaces far less complicated than this Obamacare one, I can categorically state that this level of a testing is ludicrously inadequate.  Such a complicated system should have at least three months of extensive inside (Alpha) testing of the totally integrated software … after an equivalent amount of module testing (which I also doubt really happened).

Then, in order to have the slightest chance of working smoothly, this system should be turned over for six more months of end-user (Beta) and insurance company testing with at least an additional month or two under a simulated full load.  If this were done, then one might have a reasonable chance (fingers crossed) of a system launch that would not bring embarrassment to Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Thus, instead of almost a year of testing after the modules had been fully checked out and debugged (pants on fire!), this system had two weeks!  Yikes!  And we taxpayers spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the development of this piece of dreck.  To launch a software product without the level of testing described above is a criminal act propagated by charlatans of the first order.

This surely will bring seas of shame on Secretary Sebelius and the Obama administration … humility I doubt.

Afterthought: Little noticed (but probably more important) in this debacle about the Obamacare website failures are the security problems that abound around it. Much of the testing that was apparently not done should also have been directed at protecting all the confidential information being collected there ... and also insuring that cyber-squatters could not take advantage of this internet disarray to misdirect naive medical insurance seekers onto bogus websites ... see: Newsmax Story. 

These cyber-security issues, in the end, may be the real straw that eventually breaks Obamacare's back.