Healthcare.Gov

~ Laura

I’m worried about the implementation of Obamacare.

The first problem is the name. Most people use the word “Obamacare.” If you google “obamacare,” it doesn’t automatically go to the government website.

Second problem is volume. I tried to log in and I got a “too much volume” error.

Worried. worried.

Published by Laura

5 thoughts on “Healthcare.Gov”

  1. I was able to get through to the healthcare site, but get a busy error when I click through to the link for my state site. I’ll keep trying though — I don’t regard internet busy errors on a launch as being evidence that they won’t eventually work.

    The healthcare.gov site is snazzy. I think my daughter would approve of the design (though I’ll ask her when she comes home).

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  2. There were millions of hits. No website is built for that kind of volume. And considering the complexity of eligibility and the interfaces required, there wasn’t a long timeline.

    I’m not worried. Anyone who wants to be enrolled for January will get a chance to enroll. If it has to be today or else, I’m guessing they don’t really need healthcare that badly.

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  3. The official name of the program is “Affordable Care Act”.
    That’s what you search for.
    “ObamaCare” is a nickname, coined by Republicans to be disparaging. (You did know that, right?)
    As to the website being busy…every try to get hot tickets from TicketMaster when they go on sale?

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  5. Here’s a paper trail of finger pointing and panic from inside the healthcare.gov project that starts back in July.

    http://www.cnbc.com/id/101202297

    Sample: “”Suffice to say, the upshot is that the FM build appears to be way off track and getting worse,” Grant wrote. “We also finally were told that there are only 10 developers total working on the FM build for all functionality.”

    “Only one of these developers is at a high enough skill level to handle complex issue resolution, which now appears to be required for all aspects of our build,” Grant wrote.

    “Grant concluded his email by saying, “While OIS has always said we had an independent team for FM development, they have never revealed the seriously substandard level of staffing that this team has.”

    “”We believe that our entire build is in jeopardy,” Grant wrote. “I think we need to consider which items in our build will not be done if we don’t get substantially greater staffing levels.””

    More recently, Henry Chao, the Deputy Chief Information Officer of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services testified that 30-40% of the website is unfinished, including the back office, the accounting, and the part that allows payments to be made (which is kind of a big deal).

    http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2013/11/19/cms-official-60-to-70-percent-of-obamacares-web-system-still-hasnt-been-built-n1749461

    Back in March, Henry Chao (who was certainly in a position to know), was publicly worrying that the website lunch was going to be rocky.

    ““The time for debating about the size of text on the screen or the color or is it a world-class user experience, that’s what we used to talk about two years ago,” Henry Chao, an official at the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services who is overseeing the technology of the exchanges said at a recent conference. “Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience.” Chao also described himself as “nervous.”

    “…As originally pitched, the exchanges were to be easy to use — like Expedia or Orbitz for health insurance — allowing users to fill out basic information, have the government database verify their eligibility, and then enable them to choose among competing plans. But achieving this has been proving to be a huge hurdle.”

    That was written back in March.

    http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2013/03/23/obamacare-administrator-on-implementation-lets-just-make-sure-its-not-a-thirdworld-experience-n1546635

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