Obamacare’s web site is really bad | Hacker News Reader

Obamacare’s web site is really bad

washingtonpost.com

41 pointsbjudson56 comments

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.

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".

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

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.

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.

Re: 3, have you actually used other government sites? Particularly for tax returns, which approximately the same percentage of people have legally been required to file for decades?

Not saying it's great, but when compared to tax returns and particularly other health insurance sites, its usability is downright fantastic.

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.

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.

As I see it the point was to make it less unaffordable. Certainly "less painful" would be desirable, but as long as people can get the coverage (open enrollment is several months long, so a few days of downtime is bad, but nonfatal from a service perspective) and care gets reimbursed (still unknown, but I don't think it uses this particular infrastructure) I think you have to view the system implementation as a success.

Again, BCBS et. al. have been inflicting terrible web experiences on their users for quite some time now.

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!

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.

>> 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.

On most health insurance sites, the first page is splashy and nice and then the sign-up process looks like it was transported to the present directly from 2003.

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".

>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?

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.

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.

I think they're saying that the username has to match [a-zA-Z0-9_\.@/-]{6,} - note the "or" there.

Ah, okay. That makes more sense. But I thought the standard way to phrase that restriction was something more like "Username may only contain letters, numbers, and the symbols _.@/- ."

Speak of the devil... We just used this terrible site which is used to manage gift cards, and it requires all usernames include a number: https://www.ucard.chase.com/

> 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.

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.

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

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.

I see it as any big new service out there. In the beginning there is going to be a spike in user interest.

That's what I was thinking. If experienced development organizations like Blizzard and EA and Rockstar can't pull off a glitch-free first day launch, I'm going to cut these government agencies some slack.

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...

> 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.

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.

FYI, I was getting the exact same thing, and called the 800 number, and was told that there were specific issues related to my (ID) exchange and that they had techs working on it.

Sure enough last night I was able to get in with the credentials I signed up with.

I won't be signing up for any plans through it though, similar coverage would cost me about the same as what I pay now. Then again, my employer picks up 50% of my premium, so for some people it may represent a huge savings.

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

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.

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.

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?

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. . .

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

Anyone is interested in building more tools?

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?

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.

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!

They hid all of that complexity behind an essentially non-functioning website....genius!

The website's easily among the best this government, or any government, has ever created. It hasn't had a single minute of downtime (the Healthcare.gov servers have handled the load without a hiccup), it looks great, it's easy to use, it's mostly open source (on GitHub no less), and during off-peak hours I had no problem making an account. All that in a few months with a small team and no headline-making budget over-run. The only "non-functioning" aspect is likely that the legacy systems it talks to can't handle that many millions of people a day. Even in the face of those failures, the site doesn't crash or unhelpfully throw you some cryptic error code, it puts you in a queue and eventually tells you it's too busy and asks you to use the call center in the meantime.

http://i.imgur.com/xAikKoM.png

Sure, it's not accomplishing its goal for everyone yet (over 2.4 million have been able to sign up for new plans, or so I heard on NPR today). But, from the perspective of "I could've built a better website alone in my bedroom", no he couldn't, as what this team built is working great despite doing a lot more behind-the-scenes than one might expect.

You've made a bunch of hyperbolic (reads more like B35T W3BS1TE EVAR!) and unsupported statements in that reply.

There has been no official release of how many people have signed up for actual plans -- Jay Carney said as much at his daily press briefing today.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/04/1244260/-Briefing-b...

Considering the "patient zero" cause celeb from yesterday who supposedly signed up for a plan without a hitch was essentially caught in a lie:

http://www.ajc.com/weblogs/political-insider/2013/oct/03/one...

Forgive me for being a bit skeptical that actual plan signups are a small fraction of your claimed 2.4 million.

I hate to pile on, but this just came across my Twitter feed.

"The federal government will take down a critical part of HealthCare.gov, the Obamacare web portal, for a portion of the coming weekend as programmers feverishly work to fix major glitches that are impeding enrollment and marring the debut of the centerpiece of President Barack Obama's health care reform law."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/04/obamacare-website_n...

We've all acknowledged that the site isn't working right now. That's not evidence that you could've built a better one, or that it's simple as "querying a database". I think you've lost track of the conversation, and this entire story's been flagged off the front page, so let's leave it at that.

Let's leave it at this "It hasn't had a single minute of downtime". So with the shutdown does your Organizing For America paycheck still clear?

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

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.

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

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

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

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

http://toprate.org/FILES/programmers.jpg

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

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.

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".

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