Tech Talk
Like everyone else, geeks gossip and spread rumors. Currently at the top of the charts is the disastrous roll-out of the ACA/Obamacare that the media hasn’t really noticed as they are preoccupied with Cruz the Confused and his merry band of whackoes holding their ground against little kids going to Headstart and getting food through WIC.
There seems to be a growing consensus that no one expected the server loads that have been seen, so the capacity just wasn’t there.
People who should know say those who built the system aren’t the worst coders in the world, but they certainly aren’t the best. Apparently the best coders didn’t even put in bids because they didn’t want to support all of the overhead costs of dealing with a government contract, and then waiting for their money.
A big reason new large government IT projects fail is because no one who could actually create what was needed has the deep pockets required to work for the government.
5 comments
We’ve had no problems here in California. The web site went offline a couple of times while they tweaked it, but not for more than an hour at a time, and always at off-peak times.
But we set up our own web site and exchange rather than using the Fed’s…
Yeah… I have to say that I went *TILT* when I read that Bill Maher & Chris Matthews actually agreed that the Rethugs are ass-hat’s and on the reason for the Affordable Care Act’s websites were having problems (and they didn’t refer to it as *OBamacare*!)
*TILT*
Maher and Matthews brawl with conservatives: You’d like us only to fund ‘the s**t we don’t need that you want’
*TILT*
Dammit! Stop doing that! Sheesh! 😉 😆
Like the law itself, it’s the initial purposful design of the process that upsets me more than the implementation screw-ups. The whole thing reeks of an arm-twisting, deceptive, total marketing approach. Apparently it isn’t possible to get a scrap of real, specific information about prices or options without going through a formal application for enrollment. And please get that “generic sympathetic woman” photo off my damned screen. I want information, not advertising.
Painted, that’s not a problem in California. You can find the complete details of each plan, including pricing and benefits, without giving a scrap of information other than your age and whether you’re a smoker or non-smoker.
Whatever problems there are with the Federal web site, the big ones will be resolved in the next iteration, which if they follow a typical web site development cycle should be deployed this weekend. People have almost three months to sign up for health insurance through the exchanges. That’s more than enough time to fix any problems that have been found once it hit actual customers.
As for why the California web site survived better, my guess is that the very fact that you didn’t have to give any details to surf the options has a lot to do with it. Many people were just curious, and keeping non-permanent session data around is always less pressure on a database than persisting a large amount of personal information.
The major design issue I see with the Federal site is that they have to gather all of the parameters required by the multiple state exchanges before they can pull up the relevant state information. Those states that have their own systems can reduce the parameters to what their system requires and no more if you are just browsing.
The Feds are trying to do one front-end for fifty back-end systems that may or may not work as specified in the documentation.
Fallenmonk tried it in Georgia and it hit a brick wall when he submitted the form.
Hell, as long as WordPress has been around, I don’t bother to update until the latest version has been out a month, which is why I’ll be going from 3.52 to 3.61 at some point.