<p>In a story that has gone viral among conservative news sources, Michelle Malkin reports that while private health exchanges have operated smoothly and satisfied customers for decade, the Obamacare models are on &#8220;life support.&#8221;  ;According to the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/almost-half-of-obamacare-exchanges-are-struggling-over-their-future/2015/05/01/f32eeea2-ea03-11e4-aae1-d642717d8afa_story.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Washington Post</a>, almost half of these exchanges will suffer financial struggles despite $5 billion in federal subsidies.</p>
<div></div>
<div>Oregon&#8217;s exchange has been shuttered after government overseers squandered $300 million on their failed website, and shady consultants are under investigation by the FBI and other authorities.  ; Hawaii&#8217;s exchange is demanding another ;$30 million cash infusion to remain financially viable after securing $205 million for start-up costs.  ;Maryland has perhaps the most troubled exchange, improperly billing the federal government for over $28 million, after squandering $90 million on &#8220;technical issues.&#8221;</div>
<div></div>
<div>Author&#8217;s note:</p>
<div></div>
</div>
<div>It blows my mind the magnitude of the waste here, this is simply not that complex an operation.  ; I&#8217;ve managed design and development of software in much more complex environments, while still protecting valuable data (stuff hackers could steal and make millions from, so protection was a serious concern).  ; There are multiple examples where small teams, just for the heck of it, set up a functionally similar system over a couple of weekends.  ;I think my team could do the same. ;</div>
<div></div>
<div>You might say &#8220;oh but this has to handle millions of people!&#8221;  ;OK, so you go to a hosting vendor with a good reputation like RackSpace, or maybe even the Amazon Cloud, and you pay a couple thousand a month for the processing power and bandwidth to support it.  ;And lest you think this is a serious problem, your average Word Press site can easily handle a million database hits per month for about $100 per month.  ;A system I manage can easily hande 40,000 sequences per day with multiple processing steps, in a hosting environment that costs about $70 per month.</div>
<div></div>
<div>Want security? Of course.  ; The industry standard is ;Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard  ;(PCI certification).  ;This is the standard that large eCommerce sites must meet to store credit card information.  ;I&#8217;ve been through this with a client, its very thorough and a pain in the butt.  ;However it includes a major amount of penetration testing and checking by outside.  ;This is the standard demanded by the major financial houses.</div>
<div></div>
<div>&#8220;Oh,&#8221; you might say, &#8220;but the code has to be checked and rechecked for software defects.&#8221;  ;Ok there are companies that do that as well.  ;There is a whole industry that supports due diligence in software design where experts go through your code line by line and make sure its up to best practices and is not hackable.  ;Its expensive, but we are still not talking millions of dollars here.</div>
<div></div>
<div>You might also say &#8220;but oh, you have to take into account so many different factors to provide an insurance quote.&#8221;  ; Yes, true.  ;But aren&#8217;t insurance companies already doing this?  ;Not like we have to re-invent the wheel&#8230;</div>
<div></div>
<div>In my book, to get the Rolls Royce of software packages might be in the $500,000 range in the private sector.  ;In the government sector, add 200% to deal with the bureaucracy.  ; In the entrepreneurial world, a prototype might cost $20,000 utilizing job exchanges and overseas labor (I was once told you could get a &#8216;white label functioning facebook&#8217; for about $50,000).  ; So lets compare the number $20,000, the entrepreneurs price,<br />
  ;to $300,000,000 and $5,000,000,000 provided by the government.  ;This should help you understand the magnitude of the waste here.</div>
<div></div>
<div>I have a lot of problems with Obamacare, mostly stemming from the socialist nature of it.  ;This is just further proof of the ineptitude of the Obama administration in attempting to re-engineer American society.</div>