Obamacare Tag

The House GOP Conference issued the following statement today (received via email) regarding a conversation between a potential customer and an online chat customer service representative for Healthcare.gov:

Earlier today, the House Republican Conference released a video highlighting actual excerpts from an online chat between a potential customer and a customer service representative for Healthcare.gov.  The individual who experienced the chat session was Adrian Smith, 34, of New Jersey.  Smith released the following statement to confirm his story with Healthcare.gov: “Thank you for your inquiry about my experience on October 11, 2013 using the healthcare.gov support chat.  I can confirm that the excerpts used in the YouTube video and the full transcript posted at www.gop.gov/yourstory is authentic and exactly as I experienced on October 11. I am a resident of New Jersey and work for a higher education institution. I am not employed by the Republican Party. “After a recent job transition, my family needed to make an informed decision about healthcare options for the approaching year. After repeated registration problems, I was able to create a healthcare.gov account on October 11 and began the tedious process of entering specific personal information about our family. Each page resulted in a long wait before being able to proceed. At some point in the process it appeared that our family information became corrupted and I was unable to proceed with the family profile.

The fallout of the launch of the Obamacare website continues, and as the administration spins and deflects questions, media outlets are digging deeper for answers that are sure to bring new concerns to light.  And that's aside from all the other general concerns about the impact of the law itself. The Washington Post came out with a report yesterday that contained a few key pieces of information that reaffirms what many have already suspected.

Days before the launch of President Obama’s online health ­insurance marketplace, government officials and contractors tested a key part of the Web site to see whether it could handle tens of thousands of consumers at the same time. It crashed after a simulation in which just a few hundred people tried to log on simultaneously. Despite the failed test, federal health officials plowed ahead. When the Web site went live Oct. 1, it locked up shortly after midnight as about 2,000 users attempted to complete the first step, according to two people familiar with the project.

Later in the report, it indicates that "U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park has said that the government expected HealthCare.gov to draw 50,000 to 60,000 simultaneous users but that the site was overwhelmed by up to five times as many users in the first week."  CGI, which worked on the shopping and enrollment applications, reportedly built it to accommodate 60,000 concurrent users, according to the Post.

Last year the big technology news was how President Obama's re-election campaign used technology to beat Mitt Romney. This year's big technology news is the failure of the introduction of Obamacare's healthcare exchanges. https://twitter.com/JayCaruso/status/390835631493898240 Last year, even before the election, President Obama's IT operation got noticed. A June 2012 article in Politico asserted:

The depth and breadth of the Obama campaign’s 2012 digital operation — from data mining to online organizing — reaches so far beyond anything politics has ever seen, experts maintain, that it could impact the outcome of a close presidential election.

Two weeks into the launch of the Obamacare website, issues continue to be unearthed and the administration remains short on answers. A few interesting paragraphs from this piece in Politico last night: At a summit of health care advocacy groups at the Newseum on Tuesday, the audience...

As the Obamacare website continues to struggle with issues since its rollout, more and more information is emerging that tells us the problems extend beyond “glitches.” The NY Times published a lengthy article over the weekend, detailing more of the issues as viewed by various sources....

More technology experts are warning that glitches in the Obamacare system could take longer to iron out, as many remain unable to get beyond the earliest steps in the signup process. From Politico: The glitch-plagued Obamacare rollout might be just the beginning: A series of potential technology...

Remember, we had to pass the law to find out what was in it....

The other day, I wrote that long wait times are not the only issue with the Obamacare website, highlighting my skepticism of the administration’s claims that high volume was to blame for all the glitches in the system. It turns out that Reuters news agency spoke with five technology experts who expressed similar skepticism and question the architecture of the Obamacare website.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversaw development of the [Obamacare] site, declined to make any of its IT experts available for interviews. CGI Group Inc, the Canadian contractor that built HealthCare.gov, is "declining to comment at this time," said spokeswoman Linda Odorisio. Five outside technology experts interviewed by Reuters, however, say they believe flaws in system architecture, not traffic alone, contributed to the problems. For instance, when a user tries to create an account on HealthCare.gov, which serves insurance exchanges in 36 states, it prompts the computer to load an unusually large amount of files and software, overwhelming the browser, experts said. If they are right, then just bringing more servers online, as officials say they are doing, will not fix the site.