President Barack Obama’s health care website, healthcare.gov, has been plagued by serious technical glitches such as garbled text, error messages and page-loading delays since it launched three weeks ago. The problems have yet to be fixed. Meanwhile, millions of insurance seekers have not been able to sign up. Both parties have rightly urged Obama to fix the kinks as soon as possible, and questions have risen over whether the problems are related to inefficiencies in the law itself.
The website is designed in a way that demands customers enter detailed personal information before choosing from a range of options. Conservative political commentators have speculated that the reasoning behind the website’s design was prompted by a desire to withhold price information from customers until they are registered.
The website’s flaws have drastically hindered implementation of key components of the Affordable Care Act. But it is wrong to attribute the program glitches to the law itself — these are separate issues. Millions of Americans will eventually have the opportunity to sign up for coverage and, until this happens, it’s too early to judge the effectiveness of the actual law.
In his first public criticism of the website, Obama called the technical problems “unacceptable.” The move marks the beginning of the administration’s comprehensive damage control efforts. In an attempt to quell national concern, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has assured Americans that the site’s troubles will not last long. HHS is bringing in technology experts from inside and outside of the government to help correct the glitches. But malfunctions notwithstanding, HHS is quick to defend the site, reminding critics that individuals can still verify eligibility for credits, making it possible to shop and enroll in case-specific health plans.
The technical problems of the health care website are indeed unacceptable. But these digital kinks are far from a reflection of the Affordable Care Act’s system of providing medical coverage to millions of uninsured Americans. Difficulties in the coding of a federal website have allowed the political right to continue its indirect attack on an affirmed law. More than merely frivolous and misguided, conservative criticisms of digital issues impede the possibility of a quick remedy. Rather than using these problems as another platform for political infighting, commentators should support the efforts the Obama administration is making to implement critical repairs so every American can access private health care.
A version of this article appeared in the Monday, Oct. 21 print edition. Email the WSN Editorial Board at edit [email protected].
Mark Secada • Oct 21, 2013 at 5:43 pm
I think there’s room to argue that if the government is incapable of implementing complex laws like the ACA, then the law, or at the very least portions of the law, is flawed. But this is a more important point.
“More than merely frivolous and misguided, conservative criticisms of digital issues impede the possibility of a quick remedy”
There is no “quick remedy” to this problem. The fact of the matter is that healthcare.gov is over 500 million lines of code, 5 million of which need to be fixed. This wouldn’t be an issue if “the best and brightest” (WHY ARE YOU USING THIS PHRASE, OBAMA? DO YOU NOT KNOW WHAT IT MEANS CONTEXTUALLY?) that Obama has employed fall into the mythical one-man-programmer trope, but that’s exactly it, these types of programmers are mythical.
Software engineers are fallible, especially in the face of increased complexity. I remember when I went to a meeting at Morgan Stanley’s engineering department. They explained that one of the main reasons why tech companies, or tech projects, fail is because of increased complexity in their code.
One engineer implements an inelegant solution, and let’s say that it’s roughly 150 lines of code. His colleague tries to work on it but misunderstands what the other engineer was trying to do in the first place. Take that confusion and apply it to 5 million lines of code where a group of outsiders are trying, but probably failing, to understand what they have to do.
No outsourced work will fix this monstrosity. What’s worse is that the only people who kind of know what’s going on are the engineers at CGI Federal, and they botched the job in the first place.
Jeff Hasho • Oct 21, 2013 at 2:32 pm
“Difficulties in the coding of a federal website” – is that really the only problem this editorial board sees? Are none of you considered that the no one in the administration were aware of these problems? Yes, they keep calling this “unacceptable”, but this is outrageous. They had two years to pull this program together. For the third party the administration contracted this task out to go outrageously over budget, it better as hell be the best damn website out there. Yet up until recently no one knew about these problems as there were no beta tests (something absolutely unheard of today).
Why do they not reveal how many people have enrolled? Obviously it leads us to believe not many. I think the administration has been way too secretive about this, and it is bound to get uglier as the press begins to uncover it.
They promised a product to the American people, a product which would allow the public to easily shop for healthcare, and the fact of the matter is: it didn’t work. If this happened in the private sector, the individuals who screwed up would be fired immediately.
I could not disagree more with this editorial board on this one.
If the administration can not manage to run the front-line of a website, the single most important first step in the program, how can they be trusted to run the whole program?
disqus_3RFLAjd5v7 • Dec 2, 2013 at 9:19 pm
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140257/peter-l-levin-and-shahid-n-shah/healthcaregov-didnt-have-to-be-a-disaster