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HealthCare.gov adviser: Website “long way from where it needs to be”

HealthCare.gov adviser: Website “long way from where it needs to be”

As efforts move forward toward an end of November deadline to fix the troubled healthcare.gov website, new issues are being revealed in the process, according to a report from Reuters/via Yahoo:

The Obama administration’s HealthCare.gov adviser Jeffrey Zients said on Friday that the trouble-plagued federal healthcare website is improving, but that higher volumes of visitors are exposing new capacity and software issues.

In a conference call with reporters, Zients said progress this week has been marred by roadblocks. He described HealthCare.gov as being “a long way from where it needs to be.”

Late last month Zients said the website would be running properly by late November.  But it’s interesting to note that Zients was careful with his words in October when he said, “By the end of November, HealthCare.gov will work smoothly for the vast majority of users.”

In her testimony before a Senate Committee earlier this week, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator Marilyn Tavenner was equally careful in her words.  She said that programmers were on track to insure that the “experience on the site will be smooth for the vast majority of users” by the end of November, according to the Washington Post.

Such is the challenge with a project like healthcare.gov.  On technology projects, it’s customary to run numerous test cases that simulate a multitude of variables and predefined scenarios a user might encounter on the site, as part of the overall testing plan.  But as we’ve since learned in numerous news reports and memos, testing of the site, most notably end-to-end testing of the whole system, had been far from adequate prior to launch.  The end result in such a situation is that you can’t necessarily even identify all the issues, let alone fix them, until people (be it testers or live users) use the site and encounter and report issues.

The administration seems to be trying to give itself some flexibility in its end of November commitment, but it’s likely that as more people try to use the site, new issues will continue to arise.  That’s of course what you want when you’re trying to whip a site into proper working order, but it seems useless to point out now that these are activities that should have been far more thoroughly performed before the site launched.

President Obama meanwhile, in voicing his own frustration about the website’s problems, told a crowd on Friday, “I wanted to go in and fix it myself but I don’t write code.”

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Comments

Conservative Beaner | November 8, 2013 at 8:03 pm

“I wanted to go in and fix it myself but I don’t write code.”

Thank God for small miracles. If Obama could write code we would really be screwed.

“I wanted to go in and fix it myself but I don’t write code.”

I’ll bet that if the code worked, THEN he’d take credit.

Enough about that. I’m still steamed about his non-apology apology. And it occurs to me that he could fix this with a wave of his hand. It wouldn’t even require a pen stroke because the law has already been passed.

All he’d have to do is call for a change in the regulation on page 32 thousand and something (Somewhere there’s an exact number). It’s this regulation, not the law per se, that disallows keeping old health plans if they change.

Since he’s President and the head of the Executive Branch, which oversees Sebelius & Co, why can’t he just order a change to that regulation?

I mean, other than the fact that he doesn’t want to. Which also puts the lie to his “apology”.

When multiple people use the same phrasing to answer similar questions in different venues, that just screams “canned answer.”

When it comes to technical problems, can we officially dub this phenomenon the “Java Response”? As in, “Write it once, run it anywhere”?

I find it hard to believe that the man who captured bin Laden single-handedly with no help from anyone at all can’t write some simple little code.

A guy who heals the earth and stops the rise of the oceans just has to be able to do that.

He described HealthCare.gov as being “a long way from where it needs to be.”

Here’s where it needs to be.

Obama is very good at special-interest power politics, but neither he nor any of his chief advisers understand that a computer system built on the model of his political campaigns cannot ever work. He wants to fix a Fukujima-scale political meltdown without having to shut down the reactor.

BannedbytheGuardian | November 8, 2013 at 11:09 pm

Is that Jive talkin?

Meanwhile – in civilian land :

3 guys built a better healthcare.gov site over a weekend for free to help people.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2013/11/three-guys-built-better-healthcaregov/71195/

I bet if .gov paid them a million dollars and gave them 2 weeks they could solve the whole healthcare website mess.

You can’t make this sh!t up in real life.

Obama is a true visionary going FORWARD and can’t be expected to understand the minutia of the little people’s lives, let alone computer code (paraphrasing something Axelrod/Carney will probably spin in the next few days). Cost means nothing to this village messiah. And, he knows that it takes a government to ruin a working healthcare industry.

His legacy, as it will forever stand, is a bewildering botching of bits, bytes, billions and boastful blather all in the name of PROGRESS.

The Spectacular Fail continues to grow:

Change Has Come to America: 4.8 Million Now Without Insurance …

http://weaselzippers.us/2013/11/08/change-has-come-to-america-4-8-million-now-without-insurance/

2.2 million to go until Obama has his 7 million people whom he needs to sign up for over priced ObamaCare to provide the subsidies his own name sake wants to hand out.

You have to lose your insurance so we can give it to everyone…else.

ObamaCare is a tax increase upon anyone who cares to protect their financial interests by the purchase of health insurance. After all, what is the purpose of insurance of any kind? Protection from catastrophic financial loss. If you have your insurance cancelled consider Gap Insurance as an alternative.

Now the next shoe drops:

Obamacare Comes For The Small Businesses Too…

http://weaselzippers.us/2013/11/08/obamacare-comes-for-the-small-businesses-too/

On Tuesday, the Dunns received a letter from their health insurer, Humana. It was labeled, “Important information regarding your coverage.” It informed them that they would not be able to continue with their current medical plan in 2014, as it did not meet all of the ACA requirements. The letter included information on a new Humana medical plan did comply with the ACA’s standards, but it would raise the Dunns’ premiums by 60 percent.

Did you really think only 7 million people would be paying for ALL the ObamaCare subsidies? Yea, now the next 80 some million of you will be helping out too…

They managed to totally screw up building the website, the part we can see, can you imagine how bad the backend is. They have shutdown the data hub ie: the backend for 4 days for what they say is “routine maintenance”. Must something work 1st before you can do routine maintenance on it?. I would have thought so but this is the Feds. What a joke, there is no way this will be fixed by Dec 1st, how in the world could Jeffrey Zients after only a day or so on the job say such a thing. Maybe b/c he might have been….LYING! Let see the web site doesn’t work, neither does the data hub and most of the people who this mess was built to help are just getting put on “free” Medicaid. What a disaster. Gee, only if there were people from the start of this boondoggle would have said this will never work.