I got a shock this morning when I read the local newspaper. This story was on the front page:

"Insurance foul-ups hit hundreds -- coverage lost for many during policy transfer"

http://www.courier-journal.com/localnews/1999/9901/09/990109foulinsurance.html

Do you think Y99 glitches could be responsible for some of these failures? Or could it be a case of incompatible windowing pivot years, as suggested by this quote from the article:

"Many of the alliance's problems were due to the difficulties of transferring information to and from the dozen or so companies that sold policies to state workers. Each of them had different ways of encoding the information into computers."

If you have a background in programming, or if you know something about health insurance systems, I'd appreciate your take on the situation. This is my state that is having these problems.

-- Kevin (mixesmusic@worldnet.att.net), January 10, 1999

Answers

From the sound of this article, it doesn't appear that this had much to do with the typical date related errors. But that depends on how the records were lost... who knows why they lost records of so many people? It definitly shows how challenging testing and integrating new systems can be. Alot of that is going on right now because of known Y2K problem systems...

-- Reporter (foo@foo.bar), January 10, 1999.

Hi Kevin, sounds like this article, which was discussed on an earlier thread about the same type of problem cropping up. Can't find the thread. Search Engine!

Company Erroneously Denies Federal Workers' Drug Benefits

What I think I've been seeing the last week is that no matter what the problem, ppl in charge where these various popcorn 1999 problems pop up are loathe to admit *anything* related however remotely to Y2K. They'll give rationalizations to the computer glitches and not even acknowledge the personal pain and frustration the problems are causing. They just won't give any credence to the Y2K possibilities or similarities!

There's a certain weird reactive stubbornness. Not talking about these two articles, but more in general. Attitude of Not In My Backyard you won't catch any Y2K bugs! No sirree, ain't nothing like it, don't even go there, this is a routine mistake, because drone drone and we'll have it fixed by next week and now don't you worry just go home and forget about it, we'll take care of it.

There's been several posts about these insurance/prescription/records snafus. Be good to consolidate all problems since 1999 began on one thread; then we could compare better. Some ambitious person ...

xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xx

-- Leska (allaha@earthlink.net), January 10, 1999.

Leska,

Since I posted that article from the local newspaper, I've talked to two people who are pharmacists. I hear there have been a lot of problems since the beginning of the year. To be fair, I was also told that problems are more common during the beginning of a year due to any particular individual's policy shifting from one insurance company to another.

If there was only some way of knowing how many glitches are taking place now compared with January 1998 and January 1997. It's hard to tell from the Courier-Journal article and the Washington Post article why these glitches are happening.

It may be the quantity of problems that we'll have to look at to discern if there's a Y2K problem going on. On the other hand, we should expect some glitches in 1999 simply because some remediation will not have been tested yet.

I think I'm beginning to understand what the phrase "death by a thousand cuts" means...

-- Kevin (mixesmusic@worldnet.att.net), January 10, 1999.

The thread about the Washington Post article "Company Erroneously Denies Federal Workers' Drug Benefits" is at:

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=000MHb

-- Kevin (mixesmusic@worldnet.att.net), January 10, 1999.

Decidedly "suspicious" Kevin.

The phrase "death by a thousand cuts" might be restated "death by a thousand bug bytes."

Or ten thousand? Which ones are the "big" bug bites?

Diane

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), January 10, 1999.