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."

Comments

I'm confused

[isorox]

I'm confused, I thought that nobody wanted obamacare?

Re:I'm confused

[Anonymous Coward]

The law makes it illegal to sell certain types of insurance, and they're forced to sell you prepackaged insurance similar to the way cable companies package channels.

Yes, the law forbids selling insurance plans with fixed "lifetime caps." Especially those where the payout cap is less than the cost of many major treatments. Now, some people may argue that people who signed up for those very low cost programs did so with full knowledge that their "coverage" wouldn't actually pay their bills, and I'm sure the commissioned sales agents went out of their way to explain this risk, but it sure does seem like a short road to fraud.

ACA also bans policies with "preexisting condition" clauses. Those policies allowed insurance companies to offer substantial discounts to customers who could prove they were healthy and unlikely to actually need anything but trauma care. Unfortunately, they did so by punishing people with genetic predispositions or family history of certain diseases with extremely high premiums. Insurance is about spreading the cost of unusual but expensive events across a large pool of people - essentially averaging the cost and risk - and biasing the cost towards those with the most risk is certainly a legitimate strategy. On the other hand, it seems "unfair" to subject certain people to 3x or 4x insurance premiums just because of who their parents are.

So, yeah, people who were paying for "scam" health insurance are going to have to get "real" health insurance, and real coverage costs more. Likewise, the hordes of healthy, unemployed young people are going to have to pay a little more (or stay on their parents' plan) to reduce the costs to the few really sick people. But that's the whole idea behind insurance.

Re:What does IT run on ..

[Savage-Rabbit]

"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.

Re:Gov't project

[martin-boundary]

They shoulda used Mongo.

Mongo is webscale.

Re:Compromise Opportunity

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Obamacare Versus The Affordable Care Act

[mynamestolen]

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/

Re:Compromise Opportunity

[sociocapitalist]

So now Obama can agree to a later start of Obamacare without losing his face: He'll not give in to the Republicans, but just react to deficiencies in the technology.

To add insult to injury, the administration decided to take down the Amber Alerts website, blaming the shutdown, but Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" website is still up. They shut down the PX at Andrews AFB and the WW2 Memorial on the National Mall to WW2 vets, but the golf course at Andrews AFB, which Obama likes, is still open, as is the one at Camp David. Funny what this administration considers "essential".

For this administration it's about not compromising and punishing the American people for supporting their opposition. The pain they intentionally inflict they hope will convince most people to force the opposition to give in. A Park Services Ranger was quoted as saying they were told to make life as painful as possible for people.

"Tell your Senator/Representatives to cave or this kitten (or abducted child that won't show up on the shut-down Amber Alert website) gets it."

1. Nudge

2. Shove

3. Shoot

They are past "Nudge" and are now well into "Shove"...with scattered, mostly kept low-key (for now), but increasingly-numerous incidents where "Shoot" is starting to be employed.

The USA is frighteningly-close to tumbling into full totalitarianism.

Strat

Seriously? You're going to reference The Examiner for the park ranger quote? Come on.

For the rest Reuters has a good explanation of why parts of the government are hit by the shutdown and other parts continue unaffected, the explanation being that the parts that get funding from Congress stop and those and which are funded otherwise continue to function. In the case of the Andrews AFB golf course, for example, it's funded by user fees and is not reliant upon Congress for budget.

Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-03/troops-forage-for-food-while-golfers-play-on-in-shutdown.html

But hell...don't let details get in the way of your rant...

Re:Gov't project

[Joce640k]

Mongo just pawn in game of life.

Re:Client-side Caching

[Anonymous Coward]

It has the last-modified header and an Etag. Expires and cache-control are unnecessary. Contrary to popular web developer belief.

http://redbot.org/?descend=True&uri=https://www.healthcare.gov/&req_hdr=Referer%3Ahttps://healthcare.gov/

http://redbot.org/?uri=https://assets.healthcare.gov/global/js/lib/jquery-1.8.2.js&req_hdr=Referer%3Ahttps://healthcare.gov/

    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
        Server: Apache
        ETag: "cfa9051cc0b05eb519f1e16b2a6645d7:1370524513"
        Last-Modified: Thu, 23 May 2013 15:59:12 GMT
        Accept-Ranges: bytes
        Content-Type: application/x-javascript
        Vary: Accept-Encoding
        Content-Encoding: gzip
        Date: Tue, 08 Oct 2013 11:58:37 GMT
        Transfer-Encoding: chunked
        Connection: keep-alive
        Connection: Transfer-Encoding

General
The server's clock is correct.
Content Negotiation
The resource doesn't send Vary consistently.
The ETag doesn't change between negotiated representations.
Content negotiation for gzip compression is supported, saving 64%.
Caching
The resource last changed 137 days 19 hr ago.
This response allows all caches to store it.
This response allows a cache to assign its own freshness lifetime.
Validation
If-Modified-Since conditional requests are supported.
An If-None-Match conditional request returned the full content unchanged.
Partial Content
A ranged request returned partial content, but it was incorrect.

Re:Gov't project

[Ronin Developer]

I am certainly NOT a proponent of out-sourcing (I will not debate my reasons here). However, let's put the blame squarely where it belongs - on the accepted process of hiring the lowest bidder with no vested interest in getting it right vs one where getting it right would have great impact on the users.

If this work was being done by Americans who actually need to rely on the ACA for their health care coverage, you can bet your ass that it would have been done right - the first time. And, those who are involved can say it was an American success story. Instead, we now have another reason for it's opponents to call the whole program a failure.

Brilliant.