A few more updates today on the ongoing healthcare.gov website issues and what’s apparently being done to address them.
The most important of those being that the administration says the site will be in proper working order in a month, and that QSSI – which has been one of the contractors on the current website project – will serve as a general contractor in overseeing this cleanup phase. From USA Today:
The troubled HealthCare.gov website will be running properly by late November, said Jeffrey Zients, President Obama’s appointee to fix the problems that have plagued the site since its Oct. 1 opening.
“By the end of November, HealthCare.gov will work smoothly for the vast majority of users,” Zients said Friday. “The HealthCare.gov site is fixable. It will take a lot of work, and there are a lot of problems that need to be addressed.”
Zients, former acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, was called in Monday to help with the site until it is fixed. He helped with other website glitches during Obama’s first term.
QSSI, a division of UnitedHealth Group, will serve as a general contractor to oversee the effort, he said. Their existing contract for the site has been renegotiated.
Philip Klein over at Washington Examiner was on a conference call this afternoon with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and Jeff Zients, and offers a few additional pieces of information. (This is only an excerpt of several he mentions):
— Though CMS had insisted on Thursday that the problem with bad enrollment data being sent to insurers was “isolated” (an account contradicted by insurance industry sources), Zients acknowledged it was a major issue and said it was at the top of the punch list.
– Zients said that 90 percent of users can now create an account on healthcare.gov, but only about three out of 10 can successfully complete an application.
– CMS spokeswoman Julie Bataille said that of the 700,000 people who had completed applications, about half came through healthcare.gov, which serves residents of 36 states. As she explained Thursday, completing an application merely means people who have gone through the process of determining their eligibility for federal subsidies. It does not necessarily mean they have actually picked a plan.
— In the face of repeated questioning from Sarah Kliff of the Washington Post, Bataille and Zients refused to name any individuals or companies involved in the “tech surge” meant to fix the problems. They claimed the individuals wanted to “keep their heads down” and focus on the task at hand.
By the way, I guess I’m one of those 10 percenters…
Day 24. Tried to create yet another http://t.co/Lzd7WgNCSz acct: "Your account couldn't be created at this time. The system is unavailable."
— Mandy Nagy (@Liberty_Chick) October 24, 2013
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Comments
It took them 25 days to figure out how long it will take to fix the website.
I say it will fail again.
Anyone willing to take a bet?
Nah. For example, the now … fired is not the right word, but replaced CMS is no longer running the show. QSSI, who CMS wanted to fire 3 days after launch, is taking on that role. And rather obviously going from that point to a renegotiated contract with the duty of being the integrator is not something that can happen overnight in such an politicized environment.
Nice to hear the top dog, apparently another Obama czar, admitting that the insurers are getting garbage as we’ve been hearing from many sources. Actually admitting the real problems and their importance … well, no one can predict if they’ll succeed (in time), but the things that made certain they wouldn’t are said to have been fixed.
“…will be in proper working order in a month,”
This is got to be the joke of the decade!
The fog of fantasy has claimed every sense of reality..
Personally, I want it fixed as soon as possible. As the president said, Obamacare is alot more than a website. I would like the website fixed so that even Amanda Marcotte can find out what a giant bucket of suckitude it is. Death Spiral indeed.
The simple way to fix it is to remove the requirement to pre-qualify before entering the site. Doing that means every inquiry no matter how tentative engages every facet of the site and all inter-agency links, some of which will break under any stress.
Instead, build it like most commerce sites where you can look around as long as you like before you engage anything complicated. California’s site does this and it works well, mechanically. The database is outdated, but the mechanics are OK.
It was probably built that way before someone ordered them to hide prices and everything behind the moral equivalent of a paywall.
No, no, while that nearly last minute change has caused no end of troubles up front in the process, notice the fix-it czar admitting the system has been sending garbage to the insurers (which, BTW, is done through a well defined, decades old protocol, i.e. it’s Healthcare.goc that’s been screwing up).
Right now the handful of … can we really call them citizens anymore? who get all the way through the system can be individually contacted by the insurers to correct everything except subsidies due (which only the this federal system can do, for everyone, state exchanges and insurers as well, and three guesses how accurate it seems to be).
If all the front end problems were fixed, like the prequalification, which in all fairness to the site is needed to get FICO credit scores since they’re part of policy pricing, the floodgates of garbage data to the insurers would open with truly unfortunately results.
But they won’t
And how much more is this fix going to cost? And the next one? And the one after that?
This might be a good time for ABC, NBC, CNN, NY Tines, Wash. Post, etc. to pin down precisely what “proper working order” truly means. Objective, quantifiable, & verifiable metrics. Such as out here in the real world.
Could become sort-of slippery a month from now.
Then who exactly WILL be beheaded (OK, figuratively) when such objectives are not achieved. And no more lame little-girl excuses.
The definition is simple. The system must be as accurate, timely, and as stable as the system that generates paychecks for employees of ABC, NBC, CNN, NY Times, Wash. Post, etc.
Great, now most of us will get to enjoy TWO TURKEYS at the end of November.
Wookies girlfriend got the no-bid contract to develop this site. Her experience is in Affirmative Action & Play Station.
Notice the alert only said “…late November”. No year mentioned.
Holiday fun.
One estimate says 5,000,000 lines of code need to be rewritten.
That will take more than 30 days, regardless of how many people they have writing or proofreading the code, because the fundamental structure of the website and it’s security issues are still flawed.
And to think, that I used to think that the Teapot dome was a scandal. lol
5,000,000 lines of code re-written.
The whole project, right?
Obamacare should be scrapped, repealed, defunded, gone. That said, arrogance abounds. Rather than delay and take the required amount of time to fix this problem (if possible) His Arrogance pushes through, assigning an arbitrary date that may or not be met. In the meantime, Americans are losing their coverage right and left, their lives once again in upheaval.
Collateral damage, dead bodies or shattered lives, means nothing.
And in the end the problem is not the website.
I almost died laughing when the contractor’s reps said that each of their parts worked in isolation but that no one had tested it as an integrated system.
Not only is system integration the hardest part of large projects, but it is also the most intensive thing to fix when there’s a problem.
A month?!? Are they hoping we won’t notice when it still doesn’t work? It would take them a month to devise paper forms to file, and they really would be better off at this point doing it that way.
But no, they are going to “double down on stupid”, seemingly the motto of this administration.
Did anyone specify which year? Testing a site of that complexity would take more than a month. If parts of it need significant re-writes, then it will take longer. Hard to even guess how long it will take, so we will have to see. I would be surprised to see it fully functional much before 2015.
Someone observed that Obama is likely to take the incremental excuse route, when it isn’t ready Nov. 30, he will declare January 1st the new target, then February 15, etc., as long as the media will let him get away with it.
The website problems are huge, but technical. They will get fixed at some point (not in a month). But the defects of the law are legion and will show up more clearly as more people lose their current coverage and find out how much 404Care will really cost them.
MSM will let him get away with it. They are blindly in love with him.
They will find a way to blame it on G.W.Bush.
If Democrats and their paid advisers had been serious about “affordable” health insurance the billions piling into advertising, fixing code glitches, hiring navigators, and other slush fund waste could easily have been avoided.
Nothing prevented these people from devising a few packages, from catastrophic to chronic coverage, letting individuals co-pay a small amount through their paycheck, like FICA, and the federal government would fund the rest. It could have been automatic, unless the person decided to have no coverage.
ACA is a deliberate monstrosity. Anyone of those “smartest people in the room” could have devised a simpler program.
Yet I realize that with the way our government works, actually helping people is besides the point.
To get to European Socialized Medicine, a one payer system, Obama’s plan is to break the back of the insurance industry and move total control to government. All insurance companies will be nothing more than contracted 3rd party claims adjusters for Obamacare. The object to remove any form of private insurance coverage unless highly taxed.
The current ratio of working pre-open enrollees, those who work and pay for entitlement, to non-working, dependent on government entitlement is now 1:1.7. Current Medicaid enrollment in Obamacare is leading 3:1 in the state exchanges. Millions who have been insured have had their current coverage dropped with a projection to reach 35 million looking to replace policy cancelations. Is this government collusion or share holder profits?
To re-enroll under Obamacare, only a portion will receive any subsidy to offset higher premium and even higher out of pocket deductibles with mandated coverage and higher co-pays. People who are non-subsidized, will stop enrolling out of financial necessity as well as the eligible classified group of young and healthy and opt to pay the penalty as a billable. Leaving who to support the program?
A created crisis and government take over will fix it. If Obama can move this forward as envisioned (or downward) quickly with minimum interference you will see the health “crisis” occur during the months leading up to Hillary’s election. (and Bill’s Cabinet appointment)