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."
This isn't exactly surprising. (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:Computer ? Website ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Silly question, but... what happens when you want to apply and you don't have a computer ? Surely, by definition, a sizable portion of the population that requires Obamacare doesn't necessarily have the means to have a computer or an internet connection.
And no, "anybody has a computer these days" is not an answer. I know plenty of people who don't have enough to feed themselves, let alone buy a computer - let alone one that's recent enough to cope with plugins that invariably tell you "your operating system / browser is not supported anymore, please upgrade." every 6 months.
Do you have libraries in america?
Re:What does IT run on .. (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Healthcare.gov problems are real (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:incompetance out of leftists is SOP (Score:4, Insightful)
Aye, we're not the best on waiting times, and the "internal market" tempered centrally is a lot less efficient than pre-Thatcher, but - like Bevan said - there will be an NHS as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it.
Something created out of compassion and solidarity is very hard (and I mean this sincerely) for a more capitalistic society to contemplate, let alone implement.
Re:Compromise Opportunity (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:incompetance out of leftists is SOP (Score:4, Insightful)
Obamacare Versus The Affordable Care Act (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What does IT run on .. (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't matter if you're behind Akamai if your website is that inefficiently designed. 56 JS files that are downloaded on hitting apply. WTF?
When I was young we used a thing called HTML forms.
I guess they don't have enough 'zing' for Obamacare in the 21st century, that's why they weren't considered.
Re:Compromise Opportunity (Score:2, Insightful)
Amber Alert site : http://www.amberalert.gov/
Suddenly.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Republican's request to delay by one year looks like it would of been a prudent decision.
What unsupported insanity... (Score:3, Insightful)
They are listening to your phone calls, reading your emails, and recording all your chats. They are monitoring your vehicle movements. How is that not totalitarianism?
No, I'm one who has studied it fairly well... (Score:4, Insightful)
And I'll point out that while WWII started in 1939, but the precepts behind the rise of the Nazis started much earlier.
Totalitarianism does not require mass murder. Especially if the populace is obedient to the authority.
Re:Gov't project (Score:2, Insightful)
Someone forgot a LOT of things. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. . .
Re:Client-side Caching (Score:1, Insightful)
If they're using Akamai (so aren't against CDN use) why the hell are they locally hosting jQuery, albeit an out of date one? There's absolutely no need to.
You're right. Clearly what the government needed to do is make sure Google logs a record of everyone who applies for healthcare through the public markets so Google can update their marketing profiles with the knowledge of who isn't taking employer-provided healthcare. There's no possible way that handing that information to Google wold violate healthcare privacy laws.
Re:What does IT run on .. (Score:1, Insightful)
Single payer mean no choices. Coming from /. crowdm that sounds hypocritical. Microsoft = bad becase they don't give you freedoms and choices. Government = good becasue they don't give you freedom and choices.
Simplicity (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Healthcare.gov problems are real (Score:4, Insightful)
"Sacred duty to disobey the law and trash the government"? On what planet? Here on Earth, anyone who criticized george w. bush and his harebrained Iraqi adventure was an America-hating terrorist-sympathizing commie Dhimmicrat socialist traitor.
Re:Client-side Caching (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What does IT run on .. (Score:3, Insightful)
Not really. It has to do with saving money. In this regard, the government is operating the same way that private companies already operate. They have a project that needs to get done, and it makes less sense to hire a ton of workers to get a website built only to have them be mostly useless later, so they outsource the job to a firm that specializes in just that. Sure they might have a few people that will need to maintain it on a permanent basis, but not to build the thing from scratch within a relatively short period of time.
Again, already common practice within the industry.
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. The government on the other hand basically has bottomless pockets, and does stuff like where Virginia spent millions on Cisco equipment that it didn't even need. The media blamed Cisco sales people, but the actual investigation found that nobody at Cisco made any design specifications or recommendations - they were just asked for specific models of equipment by the government.
The culprit here is actually a government official named Gianato, whose excuse was "I didn't want to buy something that will be obsolete in 10 years" and was later promoted. Cisco, to their credit, actually bought back most of the equipment, probably at a loss too, and they didn't even do anything wrong.
The government failed to do what other private organizations already do - perform a use and need study to determine what their actual needs were, rather than having somebody with practically no knowledge of networking designing a specification, rather he has the job that he has because he's in some politician's cabinet, aka their "good ol' boy" network.
Having the government do it all in-house, by the way, would probably be even worse in the case of TFA, as they obviously had no idea what the hell they were doing (for example, why is it that there was nobody within the government monitoring the project as it was being developed? Yet another industry standard practice for IT projects.)
Re:I'm confused (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Insurance Plan A: High copay, low lifetime cap, very low monthly premium
Insurance Plan B: Moderate copay, moderate lifetime cap, low monthly premium
Insurance Plan C: Low copay, high lifetime cap, moderate monthly premium
Insurance Plan D: No copay, extremely high lifetime cap, high monthly premium
Insurance Plan E: High copay, no lifetime cap, exorbitant monthly premium
Insurance Plan F: Moderate copay, no lifetime cap, exorbitant monthly premium
Insurance Plan G: No copay, no lifetime cap, exorbitant monthly premium
Everyone who wanted to save money on their monthly bills, at the risk of catastrophic loss, could have chosen from Plans A or B. This would be ideal for young adults just starting out, who have very low risk of cancer, heart disease, or failing organs.
As people get into a career, (professional, union, independent, whatever) they could move into the higher insurance categories such as Plan C or D. Families may choose Plan C specifically, in case a child does have a high-cost condition.
But now, plans A-D are being shut down, and everyone is being forced to buy Plan E, F or G. Notice what those plans have in common.
ACA also bans policies with "preexisting condition" clauses.
Which is the other main reason the future insurance plans will have exorbitant monthly premiums.
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.
Do you keep full insurance on a 20-year-old Buick? Especially insurance that covers every mechanical and electrical system in the car? If you did have such coverage, would you expect to pay the same as the guy that has basic coverage? It may seem unfair to base insurance rates on people's likelihood (damn, that's a hard word to make my fingers type) of future, or even immediate, use of such insurance, but that is truly what insurance is.
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.
No, that's the whole idea behind Obamacare. The idea behind insurance is that it is a personal choice to have it or not. Now it's just a tax that unfairly impacts young healthy people.
Re:What does IT run on .. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Compromise Opportunity (Score:4, Insightful)
When you don't use the word "Obamacare" and you go through the ACA provision by provision, it's overwhelmingly supported. You have to use scaremongering and knee-jerk words, to get people to say they are against it. Ask people, do they think insurance providers should be able to deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions? Overwhelming answer is no. ACA does this. Children stay on until 26? They answer yes. ACA does this. And on and on.
And why do you think the Democrats controlled all three branches? How did that happen? They were voted in.
The Republicans biggest fear right now is that they won't be able to stop the ACA in time before people start seeing the benefits, and then they'll never be able to get rid of it just like Social Security and Medicare. Once people see first hand that social programs can actually work, and work well, it becomes a lot harder to sell their private market, anti-government, rhetoric. The ACA is a threat to their brand.
Re:Healthcare.gov problems are real (Score:5, Insightful)