Whether we need ObamaCare or not, our government owes us better quality control.
Todays post is by Ron Southard, CEO at SafeSourcing Inc.
I?m sure that there is no one reading this post that has not heard about the disastrous implementation of the Affordable Care Acts website. Although there are other ways to apply for coverage such as by telephone, the vast amount of coverage has been about the implementation of the website and its lack of accessibility.
This author reads several newspapers every day. They include but are not limited to The Wall Street Journal, The Arizona Republic, The Financial Times and USA TODAY. Quite often when I am traveling I read local papers as well. I augment that with several posts such as the Huffington Post. As such, I have read and viewed a lot of commentary and viewed a lot of political cartoons about the missed opportunity our government had to deploy a quality product regardless of the political support it has publicly to its constituency (The Public).
The first question that comes to mind is; did anyone with any procurement experience have anything to do with the development of the website and registration tool? If they did, they should be fired. Since we can?t fire our elected officials, we should fire their appointed individuals. If a tool deployed by my company had the success rate of this tool, the customer would fire us.
The fact is that exchanges have been around for a long time. As an example, The New York Stock Exchange comes to mind. Exchanges for buying products and services have been around for more than a dozen years.
So the next question, is did we ask anyone if the technology already existed to implement a competitive tool that would allow millions of people to bid their insurance needs with as many as fifty potentially different implementations (50 states) supported by a diverse insurance supplier database.
The basis of all quality development begins with a simple three pronged strategy. That is Person, Product and Process. I know this can get very detailed, but in this case the Person is the general public, the product is the tool that allows you to list a product for sale (your policy requirement) of which there are four types? and a process that insurance companies (the suppliers) follow in order to bid for the business. This sounds like and RFP or actually a Reverse Auction to me. SafeSourcing has sourced these types of insurance products for companies in the past. Doing it for individuals is not much different philosophically. There are many other players in the procurement space that can make the same claim.
Finally since we know the audience we are targeting it is pretty simple to test the system for the volume of activity you might expect. I know that our Website would handle a state implementation very easily.
So is ObamaCare also known as the Affordable Care Act a good program.? I?ll leave that up to each of you to determine. Was the deployment of a tool that offers everyone regardless of preexisting conditions some level of coverage done professionally and with the proper oversight? The answer here is obvious. It?s NO.
To learn more about SafeSourcing, please contact a SafeSourcing customer services account manager or call me at 480-773-7524.
We look forward to and appreciate your comments.
