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Administration Admits Obamacare Website Stinks
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "The WSJ reports that six days into the launch of insurance marketplaces created by the new health-care law, the federal government finally acknowledged that design and software problems have kept customers from applying online for coverage. The website is troubled by coding problems and flaws in the architecture of the system, according to insurance-industry advisers, technical experts and people close to the development of the marketplace. Information technology experts who examined the healthcare.gov website at the request of The Wall Street Journal say the site appeared to be built on a sloppy software foundation and five outside technology experts interviewed by Reuters say they believe flaws in system architecture, not traffic alone, contribute to the problems. One possible cause of the problems is that hitting 'apply' on HealthCare.gov causes 92 separate files, plug-ins and other mammoth swarms of data to stream between the user's computer and the servers powering the government website, says Matthew Hancock, an independent expert in website design. He was able to track the files being requested through a feature in the Firefox browser. Of the 92 he found, 56 were JavaScript files... 'They set up the website in such a way that too many requests to the server arrived at the same time,' says Hancock adding that because so much traffic was going back and forth between the users' computers and the server hosting the government website, it was as if the system was attacking itself. The delays come three months after the Government Accountability Office said a smooth and timely rollout could not be guaranteed because the online system was not fully completed or tested. 'If there's not a general trend of improvement in the next 72 hours of use in this is system then it would indicate the problems they're dealing with are more deep seated and not an easy fix,' says Jay Dunlap, senior vice president of health care technology company EXL."
So the story here is that a large team of software developers with no demonstrated experience in developing, testing, performing quality assurance for, and administering large scale enterprise application deployments get a federal contract and botches it horribly. Color me shocked.
I've been working in development and architecture roles for fifteen years, and have seen exactly the same pattern on a variety of scales over and over again. I've seen a number of rather large infrastructure development projects that worked out very well too, but none of those were public sector projects.
Just remember that the folks responsible for this mess are certainly still taking paychecks while an enormous number of government workers are suffering due to the inability of our Congress to do its job. Good times, huh?
Write failed: Broken pipe
"The WSJ reports that six days into the launch of insurance marketplaces created by the new health-care law, the federal government finally acknowledged that design and software problems have kept customers from applying online for coverage."
What software platform does the software run on ?
I think this problem has less to do with the platform and more to do with the fact that this is what you get when you take the lowest bid without doing some basic research on the competence of the bidder. I mean 92 files per 'Apply'? Seriously? And they rolled it out after the Government Accountability Office warned that insufficient testing had been done? This mess says something about the people running the project. It seems to me that those three months could have been well spent hiring software testing contractors to do some load testing although one gets the feeling from the descriptions that team working on this system were scrambling so madly to get it working by their deadline that there would probably not have been any time to fix any except the very worst the bugs the contractors would have found.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Doesn't matter. It's a government job, and everyone involved makes more money if it's a ten-year debacle than if it actually works.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Healthcare.gov problems are real. But asking for opinions from people who have a dog in the fight is probably less than ideal. When you ask the likes of Wall Street Journal (Rupert Murdoch's conservative rag) or healthcare technology company EXL (sour that they did not get the contract), you'll get answers that are entirely predictable.
Why is the website a clusterF? Several reasons come to mind.
1. It is a 1.0 product.
2. It is a government project, what do you expect?
3. The states who setup smaller (in comparison) exchanges had similar problems. My state of OR paid Oracle about $50,000,000 for a much simpler setup where you cannot buy anything, but can only view plans on offer. And even that did not work for first few days.
4. The developers were stupid and did not anticipate the traffic they got. Even engineering oriented companies like Google often make that mistake. If you have ever tried registering for Google I/O you would know what I am talking about.
5. Obama's coding skills are simply not up to snuff.
Team Red would like you to think that the govt. has all of a sudden become very inefficient under Obama's presidency. And under their guy Bush, it was a model of transparency and efficiency.
The USA is frighteningly-close to tumbling into full totalitarianism.
You were doing so well - and then you threw in this bit of unsupported insanity.
Indeed. Remember that Bush/Cheney failed experiment of outsourcing the Iraq War to private companies - companies that brought in untrained "experts" to interrogate prisoners, private security companies to police the streets like the Blackwater employees who killed 17 civilians in Nissor Square, Bahgdad thinking they were being fired upon, or the Halliburton contractor who improperly installed water pumps that killed over a dozen American soldiers while they were showering. Libertarians and anti-government conservatives that complain that government never works while living in a country in which quality of life is almost purely dependent on government programs - like freeways, municipal transportation, clean air, water systems, waste disposal, the internet, police departments, etc, etc, etc - should really just move to Afghanistan.
I'm a bit surprised that we seem to accept the "Obamacare" nomenclature. Can we at least try to be objective? http://www.prosebeforehos.com/video-of-the-day/10/06/obamacare-versus-affordable-care-act/ http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/09/27/poll-more-oppose-obamacare-than-affordable-care-act/
work in progress
Consider Healthcare.gov as an Engineering project. Under .gov procurement rules. . .
The law: an ~1800-page CONOPS document.
The 10K+ pages of accompanying regulations ? User requirements.
So. . .CONOPS passes approval, User reqs start getting gathered. Someone writes an RFP and puts it out for bid. Given typical Fed procurement requirements, that's 9 months to a year before contract award. PPACA passed in March 2010, so we're probably at March 2011 now.
Winner ramps up, develops a Performance Spec and Initial Design, and starts procurement of infrastructure required. Another 6 months. Sept, 2011 now.
Infrastructure stand-up and development begins. Likely another 3 months. It's 2012 now. Standard development and monitoring/audits. Pilot of basic site for Insurance Exchange, though reviews and changes. 6 months min, 9 months likely, Sept 2012.
In the next year, you need to finalize, get the integration between multiple .gov sites and agencies hashed out and tuned, and THEN go to useability, security, and scaling tests. In ANY .gov program, that's 2 years, minimum.
Which means, the first REALISTIC date for Exchange eligibility would have been October 2014. But the lawyers and politicians didn't bother asking the ENGINEERS how long it would take, they never do.
And **THAT**, is my best estimate of what went on and what is going wrong. . .
This is just one of those things that the government really doesn't do all that well. Private organizations live and die by their profit margin, so they make damn sure shit works and it works affordably.
I cannot let this comment pass. Sorry, but anyone who's worked for a large corporate beauracracy knows this is nonsense. They are just as large, Byzantine, and wasteful. That's simply how large human organizations function.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)