Healthcare.gov – First impressions are hard to get back
by Brock Bailey
A huge source of controversy over the past few years has
been the rollout of Healthcare.gov, the insurance web site at the center of the
Affordable Care Act. October 1 was the
initial rollout date for the site and since then it has been plagued by technical
issues. Even after completion of
pre-launch testing, government contractors suggested the system still had
serious issues that needed to be addressed.
The website went ahead with its scheduled premier anyways. Head of CMS (Centers for Medicare and
Medicaid Services), Marily Tavenner, attributed the problems to the system
being overwhelmed form all the online traffic. If this were the true problem, poor planning
is at fault because those at the top of the program should have expected the massive
amounts of people that were to be visiting the site. IT experts who have examined the site
determined that bad software code was the cause. This cause seems to be more realistic as the
site constantly undergoes adjustments.
Currently (11/3/2013), the Healthcare.gov website reads:
“The Health
Insurance Marketplace online application won’t be available from around 9pm
Saturday, November 2 to 9am Sunday, November 3 while we make improvements”
In my opinion, the underlying problem is the administration
being in control of both passing the legislation and trying to implement it themselves. They failed to realize the enormity of what
was trying to be accomplished and did not delegate vital tasks to the absolute
best outside experts who would have been more suited for the technical aspects
of the job. Part of the strategy that
was keeping as much of the project out of public eye and under administration
control came from the constant sabotage attempts by Republicans. Although many politicians, including Obama,
have apologized for the problem-riddled web site, there has yet to be anyone to
step up and actually take responsibility.
I just came across this interesting article on a Columbia news site. This was published today and shows a serious problem with the technical aspect of healthcare.gov.
ReplyDeleteA month ago, a man named Tom from South Carolina logged onto healthcare.gov to browse for insurance options and proceeded to input his personal information as is required.
This past Friday, he received a call, which he first assumed was a scam, saying that a North Carolina man was accessing his own healthcare.gov account and was somehow able to access all of Tom's personal information.
Tom said: "I tried to call healthcare.gov last night and they have no procedure whatsoever to handle security breaches"... "all they can do is try to sell you a policy"
I strongly believe that the government is way out doing itself in its attempt to create essentially the biggest start-up in history.
http://www.wistv.com/story/23864518/only-on-10-midlands-man-has-personal-information-compromised-on-healthcaregov
It is interesting that none of the huge tech firms like Google or others seem to have tried to take part in the process of creating the website. It would be logical that something this huge would attract the very best in the tech world, but instead it was a firm that no one ever heard of before. It might be possible that the best in the industry saw how this might go and decided to avoid any danger of being dragged down.
ReplyDeleteI think the failed launch of the website was not a mistake. The government has some of the top associates in the world working for them, and there is no way that a website so important could fail so miserably due to a "mistake". I understand there was a lot of traffic on the website, but that is something that definitely should have been thought about from the beginning.
ReplyDeleteI agree with John that it is interesting that other large tech corporations have not stepped in, but that again can be a choice the government made on purpose.
I don't think the government put in the time to get their website to work properly. It was a huge fail and honestly made what Obama was trying to do look like failure. They should of known how big it would of been and made sure it could handle the traffic that it got. If another company did the same thing it would of been called a flop and it's basically what happened to the government. Along with the security issues, the government needed to take their time and made sure their service worked properly.
ReplyDeleteI think that the launch of the website was a huge mistake by the Obama administration. The Affordable Care Act is supposed to be the legacy of the administration. They failed to make the website handle the kind of traffic that it was inevitably gong to attract. The government could have done a much better job with the website and it would have been a huge success.
ReplyDelete