Top 3 Reasons for the Flaws in HealthCare.gov

The New York Times reported  that President Obama declared Monday that “nobody is madder than me” about the failures of the health care website, but said the problems do not indicate a broader failure of the law.

 
A man looks over the Affordable Care Act signup page on the HealthCare.gov Web site in New York in this Oct. 2 photo illustration. (Photo via Reuters.)

What is certainly broken is www.healtcare.gov. Going to the website right now gives you two options: apply online or apply by phone. One way or the other the government is making it possible to register for health care as required by the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare).

The top three reasons given for the website’s problems are too many people, too much computer code, and too hot of a political issue.

1. Too many people.

That was the original excuse. Last week a spokesperson for the Department of Health said the high volume of traffic on the site was the primary reason for the delays, as many people were accessing the website at the same time, overloading their servers. 

CNN reported that “The White House refuses to release the numbers, leading many to assume they are embarrassingly low. But insurance industry insiders point to another reason: Nobody knows if the numbers they do have are even accurate.

“Turns out, some insurance companies say they are receiving data from the administration that is incomplete, duplicative or contradictory, making it difficult to get an accurate count of new enrollment.”
The Washington Post got some numbers: “The HHS spokesman said that, as of Saturday, 19 million people had looked at the exchange since it opened on Oct. 1. That compares with 8.6 million who visited the site in its first 31/2 days.”

2. Too much computer code.

The New York Times reported that “In interviews, experts said the technological problems of the site went far beyond the roadblocks to creating accounts that continue to prevent legions of users from even registering. Indeed, several said, the login problems, though vexing to consumers, may be the easiest to solve. One specialist said that as many as five million lines of software code may need to be rewritten before the Web site runs properly.”

The Times also noted, “Administration officials approached the contractors last week to see if they could perform the necessary repairs and reboot the system by Nov. 1. However, that goal struck many contractors as unrealistic, at least for major components of the system. Some specialists working on the project said the online system required such extensive repairs that it might not operate smoothly until after the Dec. 15 deadline for people to sign up for coverage starting in January, although that view is not universally shared.”

The Washington Post said, “Even now, administration officials are declining to disclose many details about the debugging effort. They will not say how many experts — whom they describe as “the best and the brightest” — are on the team, when the team began its work or how soon the site’s flaws might be corrected. Still, in talking about the repairs, administration officials for the first time conceded that the site’s problems extend beyond well-publicized front-end obstacles, such as with setting up a personal account.”

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg weighed in on the administration’s side. The founder of Wall Street computer firm Bloomberg LLP said he knew of no large computer project that did not have problems at the beginning.
Bloomberg.com, however, has a video of an interview with Department of Better Technology CEO Clay Johnson, in which Johnson says that healthcare.gov appears to have been built by “rookies”.

Nevertheless, the law was passed three and a half years ago, and one would think that in that time a website would be set up and tested, with the necessary programming and hardware, to handle the millions of registrations that the law called for.

That brings us to a final reason for the flaws in healthcare.gov.

3. The Affordable Care Act is still a hot political issue.
The Forbes website contains a story that alleges “'Healthcare.gov was initially going to include an option to browse before registering,' report Christopher Weaver and Louise Radnofsky in the Wall Street Journal. 'But that tool was delayed, people familiar with the situation said.' Why was it delayed? 'An HHS spokeswoman said the agency wanted to ensure that users were aware of their eligibility for subsidies that could help pay for coverage, before they started seeing the prices of policies.' (Emphasis added.)”

“The account creation and registration problems are masking the problems that will happen later,” said one person involved in the repair effort, reports The New York Times.