Still Looking …
The Republicans are really pathetic. A new web site failed, so someone must be nuked.
They have apparently forgotten about their roll out of Medicare Part D. That is just as big a disaster, and it took months to make it even moderately useable. I had to navigate that sucker for a friend of Mother’s and it was the most user-hostile piece of garbage on the ‘Net. Now, of course, we have a lot more tools to confuse and confound people, so it has since been eclipsed.
Microsoft has had multiple disasters with upgrades in the last year. Updates to IOS occasionally break equipment, and Apple’s map app still isn’t useable. It’s the nature of the beast – it worked great in testing and dies on roll out.
Apparently Republicans will be shocked to find out that on occasion Amazon and Google crash. It’s annoying, but it happens.
One of the problems is that the law wasn’t certain until the Supreme Court ruled on it, and the Court altered the law by changing the Medicare expansion from mandatory to voluntary. They needed parameters from multiple insurance companies and multiple states, and I assume those were behind many of the change orders.
States like Kentucky are working fine, because they started as soon as possible to implement the law. They knew what they needed early on and had time for testing.
It is reportedly getting better every day, so it will be fixed in time, but there were a lot people besides the Federal government and the coders involved in these problems. A large number of states haven’t been cooperating, and some insurance companies have been slow to respond.
If this this had worked from the first day I would have been certain that it had major problems that would be discovered months down the road. Having the problems up front at least means that people are suspicious and really will be checking the entire system for defects.
If they had gone with ‘Medicare for All’. of course, we wouldn’t have any of these problems, and significantly reduced the cost of health care in this country.
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My experience with developing and launching the new ERP application at Miami-Dade County Public Schools was a microcosm of Obamacare, and we had it easy; we were not dealing with the federal government and we were able to hire and fire the consultants as we went along. Still it was a huge undertaking with a lot of false starts and crashes even after months of playing in the sandboxes and testing. The hardest part was trying to figure out how to make it so that even the dimmest bulb in the organization could use it. Add to the fact that nobody liked it when we moved the food dish: “But that’s not how it used to be!”
For the first six months they hated it. Now they can’t live without it. And it’s still a process in motion.
The basic process is actually very straight forward and simple, but when you start with people who think that about a dozen style sheets and a massive number of javascripts are necessary to fill out a form for your name, address, SSAN, and projected income it will only go downhill. Consider the overhead required to deal with something like that, and the time if you are on dial-up or a 3G network. It is possible that a lot of people who couldn’t get in just didn’t have the computer resources to handle that circus.
Think about it, MB, this really wasn’t that complex before the consultants got hold of it. The complexity doesn’t get sticky until the subsidies enter the picture, and most of the people who need the subsidies are unlikely to be geeks or have powerful equipment. No one considered the users as they should have from the beginning.
You were fortunate to be able to review the process as it was being created and change consultants on the fly, which is very difficult with Federal contractors. You were designing for the ‘dimmest bulb’ among the users, while these people were creating a ‘web experience’. They should have been looking at the process used to buy something on the ‘Net – a very plain and obvious form to fill in that doesn’t go forward until all of the information has been entered and verified. That’s what the site should have looked like – a standard form.
Regardless, these things take time and testing, which those currently screaming don’t seem to want to understand. It should have been tested for at least three months before going live, but they ran out of time. Bad planning.
It should have been tested for at least three months before going live,
wellll……
since you can’t even start using your new obamacare insurance until january 1 2013, and since you have until march 31 2013 to sign up penalty-free, one could make the argument that THIS IS the testing phase.
It’s always bad form, though, Hipparchia, to use your paying customers as your beta testers :twisted:.
My take on it: It’s clear from the fact that *some* people are getting enrolled in the thing that it *can* be fixed. Sort of my rule of thumb as a project manager — if it works for some people, we can eventually wring it out so that it works for everybody. In its current state I’d consider it late alpha, it’ll probably be ready for beta by the end of November, and completely ready for production by the end of March. Just seat of pants, but experienced pants :).
The problem is that all of this alpha and beta testing should have started *last* March, instead of waiting until two weeks before it was supposed to go into production to even *start* integration testing. But (shrug). So it goes. What’s done is done, now it’s time to just make the thing work.
Yeah, it looks distinctively like a version .90 product. I get the feeling that the people who are successful probably have exactly the same information at all three government sites with no variations, and they typed it in properly. Normally it is the exception handling that fails.
Fallenmonk also mentioned that he got on with IE, but could with Firefox, so that may be part of it.
Yes, this is the beginning of the testing cycle, and three months is the minimum for a reasonable version 1.0, but I would want six.
It’s always bad form, though, Hipparchia, to use your paying customers as your beta testers .
“paying customers” can afford to either go elsewhere or to not buy at all, which is not a true condition for most of the obamacare population.
Fallenmonk also mentioned that he got on with IE
i’ve noticed over the years that a great many “web interfaces to taking your money” use only ie.
The problem with IE only is that you eliminate the Mac and linux users, which is not a good thing, and the site won’t be ADA compliant for people using screen reading browsers which is kind of bad practice for government web sites.
‘Too much icing and not enough cake’ seems to be appropriate at this point.
It’s a good thing they don’t allow comments 🙂
Hipparchia, we are all taxpayers (I hope!), so we are all paying customers of healthcare.gov whether we need to actually use it or not (I don’t, since my employer pays my insurance).
we are all paying customers of healthcare.gov whether we need to actually use it or not
people who might want to buy insurance through the exchanges, but could go elsewhere if they wanted to, are paying customers. people who HAVE to get their insurance through the exchanges, or go without health care, are in a “your money or your life” situation. we used to call those people “victims of highway robbery” not “paying customers.”