Obamacare’s web site is really bad

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/04/wonkbook-obamacares-web-site-is-really-bad/

by bjudson • 13 years ago

41 52 13 years ago

washingtonpost.com

bonemachine2• 13 years ago

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

bonemachine2• 13 years ago

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

kyrra• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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

MartinCron• 13 years ago

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.

ajross2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

ajross2• 13 years ago

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.

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

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!

jtbigwoo• 13 years ago

> 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.

gesman• 13 years ago

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

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

RobotCaleb2• 13 years ago

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

stan_rogers• 13 years ago

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.

gdg92989• 13 years ago

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.

dkhenry2• 13 years ago

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.

dangrossman5• 13 years ago

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!

roboneal4• 13 years ago

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

dkhenry2• 13 years ago

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

ianstallings• 13 years ago

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".

SilasX2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

joshuahedlund3• 13 years ago

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.

mdkess• 13 years ago

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

SilasX2• 13 years ago

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 _.@/- ."

smackfu• 13 years ago

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/

dreamdu5t• 13 years ago

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?

ryanobjc• 13 years ago

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.

parennoob2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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

brigade• 13 years ago

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.

wellboy• 13 years ago

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

joshuahedlund3• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

joshuahedlund3• 13 years ago

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.

Volundr• 13 years ago

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.

gee_totes• 13 years ago

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

mountaineer• 13 years ago

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.

_7fvc• 13 years ago

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?

RougeFemme• 13 years ago

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. . .

dustin999• 13 years ago

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?

Obamacare’s web site is really bad

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