Video: Fixed?

Not hardly, and for those watching CNN yesterday, the answer was a spectacular no for the front end of Healthcare.gov. Their on-air demonstration of the supposedly functional ObamaCare website produced the embarrassing result that has become commonplace for these live demonstrations ever since its launch:

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Medical producer Matt Sloane said the website had improved since its October 1 rollout, but when he refreshed the page after it showed it had been “in progress” for several minutes while processing his information, he received an error message.

Sloane’s description of the improvement boils down to this — you can go farther into the system before it fails.  That’s well before anyone can actually enroll.  Yesterday, the White House tried to spin the results by claiming that success was sustaining 50,000 concurrent connections in the database, but that’s only success if that’s all the government mandates Americans to do.  And this was on a Sunday, the slowest traffic day of the week.

Of course, the mandate is to actually purchase insurance, and the site’s front end isn’t ready to do that on the heavy scale needed to enroll millions of people in the next 22 days in order to meet the requirement. And that’s just the front end, as the New York Times reminds us.  The back end is still mostly missing (via Jeff Dunetz):

Weeks of frantic technical work appear to have made the government’s health care website easier for consumers to use. But that does not mean everyone who signs up for insurance can enroll in a health plan.

The problem is that so-called back end systems, which are supposed to deliver consumer information to insurers, still have not been fixed. And with coverage for many people scheduled to begin in just 30 days, insurers are worried the repairs may not be completed in time.

“Until the enrollment process is working from end to end, many consumers will not be able to enroll in coverage,” said Karen M. Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group.

The issues are vexing and complex. Some insurers say they have been deluged with phone calls from people who believe they have signed up for a particular health plan, only to find that the company has no record of the enrollment. Others say information they received about new enrollees was inaccurate or incomplete, so they had to track down additional data — a laborious task that would not be feasible if data is missing for tens of thousands of consumers.

In still other cases, insurers said, they have not been told how much of a customer’s premium will be subsidized by the government, so they do not know how much to charge the policyholder.

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Jeff wonders where the “Mission Accomplished” banner came from:

So where does the “mission accomplished” come from?

This is the administration where the DOJ investigates itself, where the State Department runs an investigation on Benghazi without interviewing the Secretary of State, and the head of the NSA appoints the people on a commission to investigate the NSA, of course they would have the people charged with fixing a failed website grading their own performance.

Healthcare.gov is not fixed from the standpoint of the insurance companies, nor has the security infrastructure been fixed, but that doesn’t stop the Administration from praising itself.

It took 42 months to roll out this turkey, and we’re going to be eating leftovers from the failure for months to come … and that doesn’t even include the damage done to coverage for millions of Americans who liked their plans.

Update: Aaaaaaand …. they’re not even sure about the 50,000 concurrent connections, either (via Jim Geraghty):

Government officials, who asked not to be identified in order to discuss ongoing operations, cautioned last week that they will not know if they’ve actually expanded the site’s carrying capacity to 50,000 users at once until they have that many users online in the coming days.

Heckuva job, Zientsy!

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Ed Morrissey 12:40 PM | December 16, 2024
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