Affordable Healthcare Website will delay individual mandate

[john5746]

Looks like the architecture for the website is crap, not just glitches of code. Will be some time to iron it out, especially miscalculations of premiums, etc.

 

Should this delay the individual mandate? I'm thinking it probably should, we do have to file taxes and do other things without a website, but not sure how practical it is to do this over the phone. Problem is that without the mandate, you don't get the healthy young people to contribute.

 

I'm thinking we may see a "compromise" slip into the budget deals to delay the mandate, but not at the threat of a shutdown. Republicans fighting it tooth and nail doesn't help. The only hope will be to see how well it plays out for the states that actually work with it.

 

I guess we shouldn't try to do anything hard, unless it involves killing people. "no we can't"

[waitforufo]

I agree that the individual mandate will have to be delayed if they can't get the problems worked out on ACA enrollment. I think however it's too early to take that step. If problems persist through Novermber however the mandate will have to be delayed.

[swansont]

There is no "the" website for the ACA. There is the federal website for people to use if there are not state-run websites, but there are quite a few of the latter, and by most accounts they seem to be running well.

[overtone]

The Minnesota website seems of be running - buggy and problematic, but up.

 

The problems I hear about are mostly familiar to me from my experiences with credit bureaus, insurance firms, hospital complexes, large banks, and other websites from large bureaucracies with security concerns: mostly buggy and error-filled security that prevents use of the site, inability to correct mistakes or find answers to questions outside the security wall, a general attempt to force a varied and unexpected clientele through a one size fits all keyhole presumably error-free.

 

I was recently several months, off and on, correcting a very simple and very bad mistake on the credit reports of the woman of the house, and running into exactly the same garbage as is being reported from the ACA Exchange websites - invalid and unanswerable security questions, attempts to railroad my navigation to the "out" door, obscurity and incomprehensible verbiage of hidden implication, refusal to allow editing or correction even of stuff I had posted myself, and so forth.

 

I used to blame that on a secret agenda of discouraging complaints and fending off the wronged from proper redress, but the more experience I have the more it seems to be a subset of the problem of computer security and computer expertise in general, which are a subset of the category "large system" - and we have our Laws of Large Systems.

 

I once printed the screen, and thumbtacked it over my terminal station, on which the following appeared as a reply to my request for a manual: none existed, because "The system is simple enough so that once you know what you are doing you don't need a manual".

 

And that was from possibly the most helpful and expert systems administrator I have ever dealt with. This kind of obliviousness is a general situation with large new computer systems designed from the bottom up by experts, and there's nothing odd or noteworthy or in the least unexpected about any of these problems with the ACA computer setup.

[Bill Angel]

Here is an interesting article How The Sequester Could Affect Health Care http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/02/19/172415025/how-the-sequester-could-affect-health-care

According to that article "Also not exempt from the cuts is most of the funding for the Affordable Care Act, despite the last-minute efforts of states and the federal government to prepare for next year's rollout of most of the law's big benefits ."

It's possible that the testing of the Obamacare website software before the rollout was inadequate because of cuts in funding brought about by the Sequestration.

[Bill Angel]

The Obamacare website isn't the only Government social services portal with chronic problems. I tried today to create an account at the Government's Social Security website, the access point titled "MY Social Security" : http://www.ssa.gov/myaccount/

I could not do it! I have an active account with Social Security (I'm 65), but when I attempted to create a login ID and password to access my account info online, the Social Security system refused to properly validate my personal info and create a userid for me . The problem sounds eerily similar to the problems people are having with the Obamacare website.