A Click Too Far

The failure of the websites to handle initial attempts to sign up for Obamacare is astounding. And doesn't the defense that users overwhelming the sites proves the act is popular indicate that the creators didn't actually think the act would be very popular? After all, after three years of work they gave us the capacity they thought they'd need, right?

Look, I think the act itself is a mistake. It is a mistake to socialize health care. I don't think it will bend cost curves down. I think it will stifle medical innovation. And we can't afford this system.

The very fact that the law relies on compelling people to sign up with fines shows that the system isn't really providing cheap health insurance to people who couldn't afford it. If Obamacare provided cheap insurance to those who couldn't afford it, they'd snap it up without fines for failure to do so, right?

But the online "glitches" are the story of the day. One young man getting lots of attention who managed to sign up is an Obama activist. That's hardly shocking. But the "glitches" are shocking.

How could the administration roll out a site unable to be used by real people?

I have some experience with this. Back in the day, part of my job was to run the internal website for an office of the state legislature. Legislators could do a lot of things, including making requests for research, resolutions, printing requests, and bill drafting. I inherited a system that worked and which was well liked by users. So when I worked on adding features to the site to improve it, I had to be very careful that I didn't destroy what we had.

So when the contractor made the improvements I wanted, we tested them extensively on a non-live site. I used the features. My primary webmaster used the new features. I had actual users both internally and in the legislature test the non-live site over the Internet. After working out some glitches, it worked great.

But even then, I was cautious. The last thing I wanted as an at-will employee (no civil service or union protection for me!) was to change the site during a time when it was critical for legislators and their staff to use it and see it fail during use. So I timed the introduction for a lull in legislative activity despite a bit of impatience by some to get it rolling.

And thank goodness I did that.

After saving the original site, in an early morning operation we put the new site online in our computer system after lots of testing in the contractor's system. Even then, I made sure that the new site was running parallel to the working site and only those who knew the new address could use it. The old site was still all that our users saw.

To our shock and horror, the site that worked perfectly in the contractor's computer network would not work in our network. So we did not make the minor changes to the new addresses to make them the same as the old site addresses as we took down the old site.

The contractors and our own IT people figured out what was keeping the new site from working and in short order we eventually put the site up. It didn't take that long, but our caution prevented our users from having a sour initial experience. I could not have gotten away with dismissing lack of functionality as mere "glitches" on the road to Internet-based Heaven on Earth.

And it worked. It was a seamless transition for our users who had a perfectly working site. Kudos all around to my team, the contractors, and the IT people who did the actual programming and testing.

Our administration couldn't manage this for the highest priority project of the White House. Sure, their problems was orders of magnitude greater than mine. But my budget was more orders of magnitude smaller. I had thousands of dollars where the Obamacare people had massive resources deployed by the best and brightest. You'd think that getting a web site up and running for even a deeply flawed health care law would have been the easiest part of the job of introducing Obamacare.

Yet the performance issues of the web site are a distraction from the flaws of the act itself, remember. If Amazon.com was running the site for Obamacare sign up, the act would still suck massively.

UPDATE: I like to think that addressing Obamacare is within at least a few degrees of Kevin Bacon as a legitimate occasional subject on a national security blog because I think it could be another burden that breaks our economic power which is the basis of our military power. If we can't afford to fund our military, all we are paying for is a bunch of uniformed targets and not a means of protecting our interests.