
How Kentucky Built the Country's Best Obamacare Website - scarmig
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/how-kentucky-built-the-country-s-best-obamacare-website
======
keithwarren
3 month design, 3 month build, 3 month test

Keep it simple.

That was the philosophy. Don't bother reading the article, I just summed up
the only info that wasn't just there to take up space.

Disappointing that this was light on any real details like who the contractor
was, or if it was done by state employees. What the integration story was?
Technology? Staffing count? Budget? You know, all those things which would
speak to 'How' Kentucky built the site.

~~~
keithwarren
The sad part, this is the 'best' and I see a home page that even with a simple
design pattern and a relatively easy technology stack - missed some pretty
basic best practices that are virtually free from a technical effort
perspective. 30 different HTTP calls on the home page, no bundling or
minification, 4 404 errors, no CDN usage...but it works, I guess nothing else
really matters if you meet that metric.

~~~
mkchandler
Looks like it was built with ASP.NET MVC 4, which has minification and
bundling built in. Should be easy for them to take advantage of it... maybe
they just ran out of time or don't care.

~~~
ahsteele
The bundling features in ASP.NET MVC 4 were at best release candidate and at
worst beta until mid summer. I can see why using them may have made some
developer's leery. Adding these features now as indicated by several other
commentators should not be difficult.

------
Aqueous
A site that looks like garbage but works really well is much better than a
site that looks good but doesn't work at all.

~~~
hga
Hmmm, do you really think it looks like "garbage"? I'm a back end developer,
don't claim to have much taste in these things, but it strikes me as simple
and straightforward, maybe not pretty, but not ugly.

And their images: tiny. Home page 32K, the one for individuals and families
26K. The old home page picture that used to be on Healthcare.gov is now gone,
but I recall someone saying it, or another picture on the site, weighed in at
1.8M.

~~~
gtaylor
As a fellow backend developer, this KY site doesn't look ugly to me. It looks
minimal, seems to be pretty easy to get around, and seems to fulfill its
purpose very well. It loads incredibly fast, and the text is all easy to
understand.

I'll take bland and functional over pretty and awkward any day when it's
something this important to so many. Whoever did this for KY did a great job,
IMO.

------
semerda
"SURESH PALDIA" likes to get his name into every block of JS code. Ref:
[https://kyenroll.ky.gov/Scripts/HBECommonUtility.js](https://kyenroll.ky.gov/Scripts/HBECommonUtility.js)

Seems to be a common pattern with these gov websites or maybe the outsourcer.
Bad quality code! Really really bad JS code chaining everything to the global
prototype, hoisting issues indicate low comprehension about JS, no basic
minification or cdn use et al.. awful. I hope they didn't spend in the
millions to build that.

Now if these folks could code well they would probably also build out unit
tests. Thus reducing the need for manual labor testing the site, logic etc and
launching faster.

~~~
dopamean
I really don't understand these statements. I agree that the code isn't
particularly elegant and violates some best practices but who else should have
written it? I see so many comments be it here or Reddit or anywhere really
from know it all criticizing work people have done. If it's so easy for it to
have been done the way you say then why does it never seem to be done that
way.

It seems that the devs available to build these projects for the government
aren't the best ones. The best ones must be at Facebook refactoring the Poke
code.

~~~
ilyanep
> It seems that the devs available to build these projects for the government
> aren't the best ones. The best ones must be at Facebook refactoring the Poke
> code.

There are lots of companies on Silicon Valley writing great code that are
doing things a lot more important than Facebook pokes.

------
joemaller1
For perspective, twice Kentucky's entire state population commutes into
Manhattan every weekday.

Scale matters.

~~~
zerohm
Where are you getting these numbers? I get...

Manhattan commuters = 1.6M Kentucky population = 4.38M

[1] [http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/more-people-
com...](http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/more-people-commute-to-
manhattan-than-any-other-county/?_r=0)

[2]
[http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/21000.html](http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/21000.html)

~~~
001sky
[http://wagner.nyu.edu/files/rudincenter/ManhattanCommuting.p...](http://wagner.nyu.edu/files/rudincenter/ManhattanCommuting.pdf)

------
mathattack
Forcing simplicity during design seems like a great way to avoid the
complexity that takes over many larger projects. Too bad this couldn't be done
nationally.

I'm curious what the cost of this system was. Or perhaps more importantly,
what's the cost per person that will ultimately be covered.

------
kitsune_
This is the website: [https://kyenroll.ky.gov/](https://kyenroll.ky.gov/)

If I follow a link from the home page, for instance,
[https://kyenroll.ky.gov/General/ContactUs](https://kyenroll.ky.gov/General/ContactUs)
I can't use the back button any more.

~~~
efa
Small Business >> Lets Get Started >> Create an Account Get "Object moved to
here".

Seems like the most simple path has issues. Thought the "Object moved to here"
link works.

~~~
efa
Doing some type of single sign on integration.

------
brianwawok
Was anyone else sad when they saw 2 versions of jquery loading?

But props to working vs pretty. Working + pretty is best, but working + ugly
beats broken + pretty.

------
brown9-2
The important thing to note here is that a lot of states (but not all) that
built their own exchanges are having similar success. Many states that decided
to not build their own exchange, and thus saddled the federal government with
another state to be responsible for, did so because they want the rollout to
proceed poorly so that the law will fail.

------
viggity
apparently it was built with ASPNET MVC

[http://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fkyenroll.ky.gov%2f](http://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fkyenroll.ky.gov%2f)

~~~
rbanffy
Relevant headers:

    
    
      Server:Microsoft-IIS/8.0
      X-AspNet-Version:4.0.30319
      X-AspNetMvc-Version:4.0
      X-Powered-By:ASP.NET

------
drivingmissm
It is very low bar to be the "best" site-- Kentucky has only enrolled 26,000
people in a state with over 4.3 million residents.

~~~
keithwarren
Only around 5K were legit new enrolls, the rest were transplants from the
state medicaid system

~~~
barake
That's much more relevant vs. comparing to the total population, since 640,000
people are without insurance in Kentucky [1].

[1] [http://www.kentucky.com/2013/09/10/2814767/governor-
encourag...](http://www.kentucky.com/2013/09/10/2814767/governor-encourages-
kentuckians.html)

------
MrZongle2
"The country's best Obamacare website"?

Isn't that like saying "the best Mexican restaurant in Montana"?

~~~
hga
Feh, I'm sure Montana has some really good ones, and even "average" Mexican
food tends to be quite good.

More importantly, the right wing sources I read, like _National Review Online_
([http://nationalreview.com/corner/361577/assessing-
exchanges-...](http://nationalreview.com/corner/361577/assessing-exchanges-
yuval-levin)) agree that their site works, along with those of Nevada,
Colorado, and Washington state.

I also give Hawaii and Oregon initial credit for _not_ launching their sites
on Oct 1 because they knew they weren't ready. That takes a level of moral
courage we didn't see from those running the Healthcare.gov effort.

~~~
RandallBrown
Washington's didn't work for a few weeks after it was released. It also did
things like send your password to you in plaintext.

------
meshko
This is not apples to apples. I actually just went to the site and got a
quote. The site works well and I don't want to diminish what they built, but I
ended up getting quotes from like 3 different insurance companies. Compare
that with dozens (if not hundreds) operating on the federal level.

~~~
hga
What is the area like for the zipcode you supplied?

As _The New York Time_ has noted, in the Federal exchange the more rural areas
have fewer providers and higher costs:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/business/health-law-
fails-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/business/health-law-fails-to-
keep-prices-low-in-rural-areas.html?_r=0)

------
poxrud
The website is very simple. Which means that it would not be a big deal to
throw some media queries in and make it mobile friendly. This is 2013, I don't
understand why rwd is still not applied everywhere.

~~~
yeukhon
There is a good reason not to apply / do mobile version in the beginning. A
lot of websites don't run properly on mobile browsers and the API support vary
in different mobile browsers. Hence, it's a good idea to keep them for
desktop. And a lot of people wanted to register for the health care will
either consult with a specialist (running off a dell computer) or home
computer. Not a tablet or your android phone.

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oldgregg
Political propaganda. Why is this on HN?

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antidaily
tl;dr -- all Flash.

------
interstitial
Anyone paying attention to the news back in 2001? Remember when Sun and the
other tech companies were offering all kinds of totalitarian tech solutions
(like national IDs) to "solve" terrorism. Ah, how times change.

