Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Give me the numbers! Or does the administration really know what is going on?

OK, OK, I know. I've been hammering on the first big lie we were told about the health care program: "You can keep your plan." Now that the plan has been "implemented" and we know the POTUS lied to us, let's move on to Lie #2, shall we?? What fun!

Lie #2: "We won't know until mid-November how many people have signed up."

Uh...people? THIS IS A BIGGER LIE THAN THE FIRST LIE.

Here's why, and I will try to 'splain in simple terms, without getting too technical:

When you are at a web site where you "sign up" for anything (healthcare, free membership, a contest, a survey...virtually anything you have to "sign up" for), then you, a real person, become a "record" in a database.

In ALL database programs (with zero exception), a fundamental concept in database management and the FIRST THING any database reveals is....get this....how many records (i.e. how many people) there are in the database!! There is NO WAY TO NOT KNOW THIS. I could stop right here, but I will explain.

Let's give the feds the benefit of the doubt. Let's assume that the 36 states who started exchanges also need to feed that information to the feds, which could slow things down a little, but we would be talking about a lag time of hours to possibly one day.

Each state will have its own person on staff called a "database administrator" (db admin). Even if these individual db admins all have to report separately, still no big deal. The federal db admin sends one group email to the state db admins and says, "I need your figures tomorrow." Each state db admin, in approximately one minute of logging on to his or her computer, can have that information and email it to the fed db admin.

On the fed's end, once every state has reported, a lowly clerk with an adding machine adds those reported numbers together, and presto! They have a total.

Actually, they probably are using a "dashboard" to keep this information in real-time. A dashboard in a business or in a government program is similar to the gauges on your car's dashboard. The same as your car tracks mph and/or rpm and other "performance" factors, a dashboard in a business or government program might follow a dozen or more metrics. For example, it might track how many people visited the site, how long they were at the site, how many people created an account, how many signed up for insurance, etc. etc.

Now, I would be disappointed if I learned that the feds spent $93 million with CGI (the company that built the site) on a website that did not include a dashboard. However, I don't think I would be totally surprised, either.

Soooo, with a dashboard, they know all this information instantly in real- time. Without a dashboard, and even with all states reporting separately, the compiled information is always going to be less than 24 hours away from being available.

I'm sorry to break the news to you, cupcake, but they are lying to you. Again.

BOHICA.

This was originally written by Pierre Briere to find out more on him - see what he has to say on Facebook.






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