
Obamacare’s web site is really bad - bjudson
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/04/wonkbook-obamacares-web-site-is-really-bad/
======
ryanobjc
I gotta say I don't really get these articles. What's the point? Triumph in
someone else's mistakes?

All this negativity is bad for your limbic system. Having your primary emotion
driven via rage/anger or even fear is not a health way to live life. Cortosol
and all of that, yknow?

Now, here in CA, the coveredca.com is actually really good. It does a good
job, and it will substantially reduce my healthcare costs A LOT! By 50% in
fact, and I'm not eligible for any credits/subsidies.

The ACA is hands down GREAT news for entrepreneurs. It makes covering yourself
and your family possible and affordable. And when you go to hire those
employees it is reducing costs there. You can get a platinum PPO plan in SF
for $492 a month. Typically that plan would cost $1500 at trinet (employer
cost).

I can also predict the minimization/irrelevancing of trinet too. It's primary
purpose was to pool small business for healthcare in a handy package, but now
that isn't as necessary.

~~~
parennoob
I think rather than negativity and "triumph at someone's mistakes", it may be
a combination of:

1\. They are comparing themselves to a successful commercial product (the
iPhone / iPad) which was orders of magnitude more polished and performant when
it was released. This is complete rubbish and is going to raise the hackles of
people who have worked on and delivered decent product.

2\. There are pull requests on their repo three months old that have not been
merged. People are fixing problems _for_ them, but these fixes are not being
merged -- not even the simple typo fix ones.

3\. This site is supposed to be a guide for acquiring something you are
_legally_ required to have (or you face a financial penalty). The bar for
usability for such a site should be way higher than "redirect to a a phone
line every time we get a lot of traffic".

~~~
avoutthere
Also, it's fair for any U.S. citizen to critique the site, since we are paying
for it.

~~~
parennoob
Well, even non-U.S. citizens who work in the U.S. on visas pay for the site
through their taxes. In fact, they also pay for Social Security and Medicare
without generally being eligible to receive either of those benefits.

~~~
pstack
Many Americans also pay for both of those without being eligible to receive
either of those benefits. I count both of those items as additional taxation,
in my case.

------
ajross
Having used a handful of insurance (health and otherwise) industry sites over
the years, all I can say is that while all this criticism is no doubt valid,
the bar is a lot lower than people might expect.

Medicare was successfully delivering care decades before the web was even
invented and we all somehow survived.

~~~
bjudson
But isn't the point of all this to make the process of getting health coverage
less painful? A few glitches or a slow site are to be expected, but from what
I can gather, the site was literally unusable for several days.

~~~
sliverstorm
_the site was literally unusable for several days._

Why are we still surprised when a website gets crippled by a big launch? This
happens again and again and again, and people are surprised every time!

~~~
betterunix
My thoughts exactly. This website was supposed to go from "testing" to "ready
for millions of users who will present loads of unexpected corner cases" in
just one day? That is not remotely trivial.

------
ianstallings
I feel bad for the contractors and government workers that are on this
project. Talk about a high-profile website. And I bet the amount of customer
and user feedback is astronomical. I don't know the exact schedule but it
seemed aggressive for such a mission-critical app. Something so monumental
usually takes years to create and test because there are so many use cases,
differing opinions, etc.

That being said, I think the comparisons to Apple are off. They should take it
on the chin. We messed up, and we'll fix it. End of story. Not "yeah but..
apple".

------
SilasX
>Choose a username that is 6-74 characters long and must contain a lowercase
or capital letter, a number, or one of these symbols _.@/-."

Requiring entropy in the _username_? What? I can understand the password, but
what site requires you to put a symbol in your username?

~~~
arxanas
I haven't visited the website but

> lowercase or capital letter, a number, or one of these symbols _.@/-."

says "or" and not "and", so it doesn't actually seem like there's any issue so
long as you include a letter. Then the only real restriction is the minimum of
six characters.

~~~
joshuahedlund
It doesn't say "and" but the front end JS won't let you proceed without a
special char. But if you put the special char at the end it fails without
explanation b/c a different page says you can't do that.

In other words, the sign up page text, the sign up page JS validation, the
back end database, and the trouble logging in page ALL have different
requirements just for the username.

------
kyrra
> The good news for Obamacare is that lots of people want to sign up. Lots and
> lots of people. Many more, in fact, than anyone expected. The bad news is
> that the Obama administration's online insurance marketplace -- which serves
> 34 states -- can't handle the success.

I see it as any big new service out there. In the beginning there is going to
be a spike in user interest. I'm guessing a large number of people using the
site right now are doing it just out of interest (due to news reports about
it). People browsing the site may have no intentions of actually paying for
healthcare through the system, they just want to poke around and see what it
has to offer.

~~~
mgkimsal
There are millions of people legally required to get insurance now, and this
is the place to get the information needed. People who already have health
insurance provided shouldn't need to be poking around yet, and let the rest of
us who have to deal with this at least get on the system.

~~~
fusiongyro
As I understand it, you have until January 1st.

~~~
dangrossman
Enrollment doesn't end until March 31st, 2014. Everyone that wants or needs to
use the exchange has 6 months to do so for this year's plans.

------
joshuahedlund
From my experience, yes the site is really bad, and it's more than just heavy
traffic.

The sign up screen lists some requirements for the username, but not all of
them. My sign up attempt failed several times with a non-descript error
message, which I attributed to the heavy traffic, until later I saw the
"Forgot your username" page listed more requirements (apparently you can't
_end_ a username in a special character, which wasn't mentioned on the signup
page, and which I only added at the end because _that_ page wouldn't let me
through _without_ one)

So finally I signed up, but I get invalid login message every time I try to
log in. Thinking maybe I mistyped my password (twice?) I clicked "forgot your
password" and entered my username. It actually sent me a Forgot Password link
to my email (confirming that I'm in the system) but when I click the link in
the email it pulls up a page that says "We could find any account with the
information you provided" \- yes, with the information I provided from their
own link. Have done that three times.

With these kinds of basic inconsistencies and bugs, I'm actually hesitant to
enter my info once I do get in, wondering what kind of massive security holes
are waiting to be discovered...

~~~
jaggederest
> but when I click the link in the email it pulls up a page that says "We
> could find any account with the information you provided" \- yes, with the
> information I provided from their own link. Have done that three times.

Frequently when I see that sort of thing it's because they're
escaping/stripping characters out - often using myemail+tag@gmail.com will
result in myemailtag@gmail.com or myemail%2btag@gmail.com and the resulting
lookup will fail if it isn't de-escaped correctly.

~~~
joshuahedlund
The link has my username, not my email. It contains a period in the middle
(again because I was require to used one). I looked up the URI encode for the
period and replaced the period in the link in case it wasn't escaped right,
but that didn't work for me either.

------
gee_totes
Here's the repo of healthcare.gov is anyone is interested in addressing some
of the optimization issues mentioned in the article:

[https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov](https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov)

~~~
mountaineer
The CMS on the front-end (and the repo you mention) is pretty clean and well
optimized. As soon as you get into /marketplace, that's when the problems
begin from what I can tell.

------
gdg92989
The comments on the Washington Post site are really a sight to behold.. I
don't know who's worse, all the conservative/liberal commenters or the
apple/android commenters.

------
dreamdu5t
Whatever. What did people expect? I'm dumbfounded people think the ACA was
somehow going to make buying insurance "easier." What planet are people living
on?

------
RougeFemme
I've read that many of sites for the state exchanges (for those states that
chose to create their own exchanges, rather than default to the federal one)
performed much better than the federal site. . .and at this point, who really
knows which factors could be driving the better performance/user experience. .
.differences in architecture, demand, testing, QA, support. . .

------
dnprock
I would be interested in seeing their capacity planning. That would tell us
how long it'll take to fix up the system.

In the meantime, we (software developers) can help. Data is widely available.
I made one info graphic:

[http://vida.io/discussion/SuRAGDs7J78HCvoxE](http://vida.io/discussion/SuRAGDs7J78HCvoxE)

Anyone is interested in building more tools?

------
dustin999
From the article: "Republicans who decided to shut down the government this
week rather than relentlessly message against the Affordable Care Act's
glitches did the law a great favor."

I thought it was the Senate Democrats voting against the house spending bill
that shut the government down?

------
dkhenry
I ask my self how much better could I do then what they have presented. I like
to think in this case I, myself, without the teams of developers and millions
of dollars could have made a system that queries a database that could handle
7m page views per day.

~~~
dangrossman
It doesn't just "query a database", it talks to a whole slew of 20-year-old
legacy systems on all different platforms at a whole list of other government
agencies. In the process of signing up and creating your profile, here are a
few of the systems, all maintained and managed by other departments, that this
website has to communicate with in real-time:

* The IRS to verify your AGI, family size and marital status

* The SSA to verify your social security number, SS benefit status and incarceration status

* The DHS SAVE system to verify your citizenship and immigration status

* The DOD, VA, Office of Personnel and Peace Corps to check if you're already enrolled in health programs through their services

Just to name a few, and all of which can be external bottlenecks the team
behind Healthcare.gov can't control. You're seriously underestimating the
complexity of this website. They've hidden it well!

~~~
dkhenry
I don't mean to be flippant about the amount of effort required to create the
web site, but who decided You needed to verify in real time my AGI and
maritial status when I am "browsing" for health plans. That's something that
can be done during a verification stage after the fact.`

I know a lot of good work went into it by well meaning individuals, but as it
stands it was all for naught as it doesn't work

~~~
dangrossman
These things affect what plans you qualify for and how much they'll cost you.
It also does work, it's not as if they built something that nobody will ever
use. Some millions get through each day, and long before the 6 month
enrollment period is over, there won't be anywhere near this kind of load to
handle.

It's only been 3 days. Imagine if Blizzard Entertainment wrote off World of
Warcraft on day 3, when it was also barely usable with almost exactly the same
number of people trying to get online. That'd be ridiculous.

If it weren't day 3 and the site was working, you'd never wish what you just
wished for. Nobody would _want_ a system where you have to choose a plan then
wait an unknown amount of time to see if you're approved, interact with a
bureacracy to correct conflicts between what you provided and what they found
in those other systems after-the-fact, have to re-make all your decisions.
That's essentially what we have now, except you're interacting with the
government instead of a private insurer, and it sucks. What they're giving us
instead is the simplicity of online shopping applied to health insurance -- a
listing of plans you actually qualify for, the true price you'll pay for them,
and online signup on-the-spot.

------
wellboy
They should get some software engineers from the NSA maybe and put them on the
obama care website...

------
bonemachine
Why focus on the negatives? Just think about all the jobs it created.

~~~
bonemachine
Ah, I love it when my sarcasm utterly fails to connect.

------
gesman
They must've hired a well-known team of web developers from elance:

[http://toprate.org/FILES/programmers.jpg](http://toprate.org/FILES/programmers.jpg)

~~~
RobotCaleb
Have*. It's must have. Or, must've, but that feels very weird.

~~~
stan_rogers
The contraction shouldn't feel weird unless _all_ contractions feel weird. The
grammticalized "have" in the modal is almost never pronounced the same way as
the verb meaning "possess"; it has become a schwa-vee or often even a simple
schwa (rendered as musta) in ordinary (not explicitly emphatic) speech. It has
really become more of an affix than a separate word, so maybe it is time for
the written rendering of the language to begin to reflect that.

~~~
RobotCaleb
Are you proposing a common spelling of "musta" ("woulda", etc)?

I only find "must've" weird as it's not a very commonly seen contraction. Much
like "mustn't". They're definitely used in speech, but people rarely type them
out, which is how you end up with people using "of" when they mean "have" or
"'ve".

I don't think I've come across anyone using "must" and "not" in a
contractional form. I shudder to think what the "of" crowd would type for
"mustn't".

