Administration Admits Obamacare Website Stinks 516
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."
Re:Computer ? Website ? (Score:5, Informative)
> Silly question, but... what happens when you want to apply and you don't have a computer ?
Obamacare by phone: 800-318-2596
Re:Alternatives?? (Score:5, Informative)
Oregon did just that. About $50mil later they had a website that did not work for the first few days. And it is a view-only site to begin with.
Giving lots of money to a large company is no guarantee of success.
Re:incompetance out of leftists is SOP (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, the communist (not Marxist socialist, but actually "to each according to his need") English NHS is awful.
Oh wait, no, it's the best healthcare system I've ever experienced.
Also the problem here is contracting out to the lowest bidder. The problem was introduction of the private sector into government work - the same problem there always is.
Ofc you're a troll, but a nice launchpad.
Re:Client-side Caching (Score:5, Informative)
Let's examine an HTTP request for a rather beefy portion of the JavaScript in question from healthcare.gov:
They're not even bothering to set the HTTP Cache-Control, Proxy-*, or Expires headers on this content, which will most assuredly limit intermediary proxy and client caching. To say this is amateur hour would be a gross exaggeration of the skills being fielded by these developers.
Much larger issues undoubtedly exist in their backend infrastructure. Given the shit I've seen in this area, I could probably spend the next hour making educated guesses about how badly they've fucked up in various regards, spend another hour partially validating those guesses, and wind up just saying "yup, they're idiots." Instead, I think I'll go to bed now. I have work in the morning.
Re:incompetance out of leftists is SOP (Score:4, Informative)
The waiting time can be a bit of an issue, and a lot of the hospitals are overloaded due to meddling by government officials who have no notion of what it's actually like at ground level, but even through that it still manages to do a very good job of keeping the population alive and healthy. We're beating the US on every health metric worth considering (Except, oddly, cancer survival rate), and at a substantially lower per-capita spending.
Re:Client-side Caching (Score:4, Informative)
That's exactly the quality you get when you outsource to Indian programmers. We've had a decade to evaluate the outsourcing debacle...haven't we learned any lessons from it?
Re:Compromise Opportunity (Score:5, Informative)
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 [bloomberg.com]
But hell...don't let details get in the way of your rant...
Re:Compromise Opportunity (Score:0, Informative)
But hell...don't let details get in the way of your rant...
Yes, lets not let details get in the way, just have another glass of Michelles cool-aid.
"Feds Try to Close the OCEAN Because of Shutdown"
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/10/05/Feds-Try-to-Close-the-OCEAN-Because-of-Shutdown
Just before the weekend, the National Park Service informed charter boat captains in Florida that the Florida Bay was "closed" due to the shutdown. Until government funding is restored, the fishing boats are prohibited from taking anglers into 1,100 square-miles of open ocean.
1,100 square miles of ocean, closed, due to lack of funding ?
The Park Service will also have rangers on duty to police the ban... of access to an ocean.
Rangers on duty, to police the closure of the ocean, but not enough money for rangers, to police the ocean when its open.
Who the hell are you kidding ?
Re:Gov't project (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I'm confused (Score:5, Informative)
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:Compromise Opportunity (Score:4, Informative)
You, are a fucking moron.
He didn't shut down the ocean.
http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2013/oct/07/tweets/did-obama-shut-down-ocean-part-shutdown/ [politifact.com]
And he didn't shut down the Amber Alert system. The Amber Alert system is a private non-profit entity at the federal level so he couldn't shut it down even if he wanted to.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/oct/07/tweets/tweets-and-bloggers-say-obama-used-shutdown-close-/ [politifact.com]
I don't know how you could ever post something from Breitbart with a straight face.
Re:Gov't project (Score:3, Informative)
No, it's because the developers are idiots that used jQuery in the first place.
jQuery has a place, and that is in creating things like word processors and painting programs in javascript. It does not belong in a form that I just have to put some data in and hit submit. (The other place jQuery doesn't belong is games, but that's a browser performance issue.)
Like why in the bloody hell do developers do this?
example.com/jquery1.8.2.js?v=1.8.2
This torpedos caching, and when you start throwing plugins onto jquery, they all do the same thing. QUIT DOING THIS. jquery doesn't change every damn minute.
Re:I'm confused (Score:3, Informative)
Obamacare was THE major issue of the 2012 election and he won. GET THE FUCK OVER IT. If the situation were reversed and democrats were demanding the abolishion of the second amendment, threatening a government shutdown if it wasn't done, would you be insisting that republicans "compromise"?
Re:Client-side Caching (Score:5, Informative)
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:Compromise Opportunity (Score:4, Informative)
The ACA is the compromise. The Democrat idea was single payer Medicare for all. We compromised and used the Republican model proposed in the 90s, and implemented a decade later by Republican Governor Romney in Massachusetts. The ACA passed both houses of Congress. It was signed by the President. It was upheld by the Supreme Court. The Republicans in the house tried over 40 times to repeal it and failed. They are now throwing a temper tantrum because they can't get their way through the established, official, channels. They're not willing to accept that they lost this fight. They'd rather burn everything down than see the other side score a legitimate victory. It's scorched Earth. Spite.