http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/10/obamacare-site-hits-reset-button-on-passwords-as-contractors-scramble/
Obamacare site hits reset button on passwords as contractors scramble
Three years wasn't enough time to get this massive IT effort past the finish line.
Getting to this page on the Healthcare.gov site is just the start of the battle for would-be insurance customers.
Sean Gallagher
Amid all the attention, bugs, and work happening at Healthcare.gov in light of the Affordable Care Act, potential registrants talking to phone support today have been told that all user passwords are being reset to help address the site's login woes. And the tech supports behind Healthcare.gov will be asking more users to act in the name of fixing the site, too. According to registrants speaking with Ars, individuals whose logins never made it to the site's database will have to re-register using a different username, as their previously chosen names are now stuck in authentication limbo.
The website for the Affordable Care Act (aka "Obamacare") launched just last week. With all the scrutiny and debate happening, if ever there was a website launch that was "too big to fail," this was it. So, of course, it did—depending on how you define "failure." The inability of Obamacare portals to keep up with the traffic demands initially put upon them has been seized by politicians and conservative pundits as evidence that Obamacare "is not ready for prime time" in the words of Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). Now, a week later, the site appears to be stabilizing, with waiting times dropping dramatically for those who haven't been able to register before.
A test of the site this morning had me waiting four minutes to get to the signup page; others got on instantly. But problems persist beyond the front door. The contractors responsible for the exchange—CGI Federal for the website itself, Quality Software Systems Inc. (QSSI) for the information "hub" that determines eligibility for programs and provides the data on qualified insurance plans, and Booz Allen for enrollment and eligibility technical support—are scrambling to deploy more fixes. Technical support call center operators continue to handle an onslaught of calls from users who can't get back into the system after registering.
In addition to would-be Healthcare.gov registrants notifying Ars about the password reset and login limbos, Ars learned that changes made to profiles already within the system may not be saved either—a problem that is only indicated by a very non-descriptive error message.
Ars attempted to contact the contractors with Healthcare.gov but did not receive a response as of this writing.
Enlarge / Healthcare.gov's profile page, where you provide your personal data, may not save changes you make...
Enlarge / But the only hint you'll get about it is this error pop-up.
Three years is not enough
CGI has had some experience with these exchanges in the past. It built the Web portal for Massachusetts' "Romneycare" and is building exchanges for a number of other states. So with that experience behind them, why, with three years to prepare, did these sites have such a rough first week?
Those familiar with how Federal IT projects usually roll will suggest an alternative question: with three years to prepare a system that is expected to cost $683.81 million—and much of that preparation being bureaucratic haggling over the rules for its operation—how did the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and CGI manage to get anything up at all?
Federal IT projects are infamous for blowing out the "iron triangle" of project management—cost, scope, and schedule. Healthcare.gov hits all three sides of the triangle. Because of the legislative mandate for Healthcare.gov and its state-run cohorts, the project was handed a massive scope. With Congress eager to cut its throat, the program has been highly budget-sensitive. And with a hard deadline of October 1 and a heavy up-front regulatory process required to create the specifications for the portal, three years was a very tight deadline.
Based on the Federal IT Dashboard, which tracks the project status and risk for most of the federal government's major IT programs, it would appear that HHS and the Obama Administration were relatively confident that the exchange sites would launch on time. However, they were less confident about it coming in under budget. Known as the "CMS CCIIO Healthcare Insurance Exchange IT Investment," the program was assigned a "medium risk" evaluation (A "3" on a scale of 5) at the end of July. That rating wasn't because there was concern about the schedule. Instead, the risk rating was assigned because HHS' Chief Information Officer Frank Baitman was concerned about potential cost overruns for the website implementation.
There were even earlier causes for concern. Back in March, concerns about the funding levels for the program prompted Baitman and HHS management to rate the program as "high risk"—giving it a score of 1 out of 5. In June, the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan auditing body that provides oversight reports to Congress, said that it was still a crapshoot as to whether the system would work on time. This uncertainty persisted because the hub being built by QSSI still hadn't been completely tested (the hub is responsible for making automated decisions about eligibility). While the policies to govern how the hub works—and how various state systems were supposed to work—had been completed, there was still a lot of code to be written to make those policies into an actual system.
All of that pushed the development of the system closer and closer to the deadline. As one reddit user posted when the site ran into trouble on October 1, "My wife works on this project but not as a developer. Last night she said, 'I have no idea how the site is going to go live tomorrow.'"
Garbage in, garbage out
The result of the headlong rush to October 1 was a system that had never been tested at anything like the load it experienced on its first day of operation (if it was tested with loads at all). Those looking for a reason for the site's horrible performance on its first day had plenty of things to choose from.
First of all, there's the front-end site itself. The first page of the registration process (once you get to it) has 2,099 lines of HTML code, but it also calls 56 JavaScript files and 11 CSS files. That's not exactly optimal for heavy-load pages.
Navigating the site once you get past registration is something of a cheese chase through the rat-maze. "It's like a bad, boring video game where you try to grunt and hack your way through to the next step," one site user told Ars.
Once you get through all that, it’s not clear that it's going to do you any good. Underlying problems in the back-end code—including the data hub built by QSSI—have been causing errors in determining whether individuals are eligible for subsidized plans under the program. In DC, that means health care plan prices won't be available to people registering through DC's portal until November. It may also mean that others who have registered already at the federal and state exchanges may get sticker shock later.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-10-08/california-admits-only-165-exchange-visitors-signed-obamacare
California Admits Only 1.65% Of Exchange Visitors Signed Up For Obamacare
While early "guesswork" had estimated the sign-up rates were not 'terrific', Covered California - the Obamacare exchange - has released data on the final enrollment rates. They are not great:
- *COVERED CALIFORNIA SAYS WEBSITE GOT 987,440 UNIQUE VISITORS
- *CALIFORNIA EXCHANGE COMPLETES APPLICATIONS ON 16,311 HOUSEHOLDS
Assuming each household is a 'unique' then that is a 1.65% sign-up rate. Doesn't seem like the huge success so many have proclaimed.
Odd that the Press Release did not mention that rate...
Covered California™ received tens of thousands of enrollment applications during the first week consumers could officially apply for health insurance at the agency’s online marketplace, as well as those newly eligible for Medi-Cal coverage.
“We’ve started strong,” said Executive Director Peter V. Lee. “The amount of interest and number of applications we’ve received in the first week underscores the demand among Californians for quality, affordable health care.”
Website and Call Center Weekly Report: Oct.1-5
Unique visits to CoveredCA.com 987,440
...
Applications completed with household eligibility determined 16,311
Number of Californians determined eligible for coverage 28,699
Small Business Health Options Program businesses registered as of 10/8/2013 430
...
“It’s just the beginning, but these numbers are truly exciting and encouraging,” Lee said. Consumers were equally excited about being able to enroll online in Covered California health insurance plans that provide quality and value, and uniform benefits, without worry about pre-existing conditions.
...
“With almost three months to enroll for coverage effective Jan. 1, the fact that thousands of Californians and hundreds of our small businesses are stepping forward in our first week is a testament to the need for the Affordable Care Act,” said Peter Lee.
Subsequent weekly statistics will be based on a Sunday-through-Saturday schedule. Total enrollment for October will be released in November.
“Covered California is committed to sharing information and will continue to report weekly on the numbers of visits to our website and the number of consumer calls to our Service Centers,” Lee said.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/08/big-new-obamacare-glitch-insurance-companies-receiving-garbled-data-on-enrollees-from-federal-website/
Big new ObamaCare glitch: Insurance companies receiving incomplete data on applicants from federal website
POSTED AT 11:21 AM ON OCTOBER 8, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT
Result: Even people who think they’ve signed up for insurance might not actually be signed up. Imagine their confusion when January rolls around and their insurance card still hasn’t come in the mail yet.
Jonah Goldberg made a good point on Twitter this a.m. Is it still fair to blame all of this on “glitches”? A “glitch” is when your taillight doesn’t work. When your brakes fail and you go careening off the overpass, that’s more what we’d call a “catastrophic failure.”
While it’s not clear how widespread the problem is, the reports from industry consultants are the first hint that the technical troubles faced by consumers trying to enroll in health plans under the Affordable Care Act may also be hitting the insurers. The companies are receiving electronic files that can’t open or have so much missing information on new enrollees they’re unusable, the consultants said.Some insurers have been forced to fix entries by hand, said Bob Laszewski, an insurance-industry consultant based in Arlington, Virginia.“If we don’t see substantial improvement by the end of this week, then I would throw up the yellow flag,” said Dan Schuyler, a consultant advising states and insurers on the exchanges. “If we don’t see it in the next two to three weeks, it’s time for red flags. The concern is some people could get to Jan. 1, and not have coverage.”…“If you’ve only got a dozen bad enrollments, that’s OK, but what are you going to do when you have 200,000 bad enrollments?” Laszewski said. “What we’re seeing in public is the web portal, which is a mess. It is just as bad behind the wizard’s curtain.”
The more time insurers have to spend cleaning up incomplete data, the more of a backlog there’ll be in processing applications and activating coverage. And that assumes that all applications are amenable to clean-up. What happens to the people who’ve been told by healthcare.gov that their application’s been received and their data ends up being so badly mangled that the insurance company can’t even identify them conclusively to contact them? This was the point of yesterday’s post. Right now the feds are telling the media that the big problems with the website are scalability and coding errors in the sign-up process, but there’s no sound reason to believe that’s true. It may be true that errors in sign-up coding are the biggest problem they’re aware of, but it’s almost impossible to believe that, given their haplessness in getting the sign-up process to run smoothly, the more advanced functions of the site will run like clockwork once they iron out this initial wrinkle. And so the countdown begins: How long before HHS has to swallow its pride and add a huge warning to the healthcare.gov homepage encouraging people to sign up by phone rather than use the site? (The contact number is already there but on an inner page, which you need to look for.) And how long will that process take between long wait times on the phone and the logistical burden of having federal bureaucrats process applications and calculate subsidies instead of the machine?
They had three years to figure this out. In theory, I mean; in practice, as Megan McArdlenotes, they let half of that time expire before getting cracking on building the exchanges. A brilliant kid can wait until the last minute and still ace a complex school project, but we’re not governed by brilliant kids:
I do not think that the Republicans can be blamed for this particular disaster. They did not force the administration to wait until late 2011 to begin awarding important contracts for implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Presumably, they were also not skulking around the Department of Health and Human Services, writing the memos that delayed, until February of this year, the deadline for states to declare whether they’d be running their own exchanges.I predicted in December 2012 that the exchanges would not be up and running on time with minimal knowledge of how the contracts and budgeting were being run, because the administration was being pretty closed-mouthed about those things. Was I prophetic? Hardly. I just didn’t see how the administration could make things work in the allotted time frame. The development cycle was just too aggressive, even with what my boss used to call a “Shake and Bake” system (take something out of the box, add a few of your own ingredients and roll it out). I thought about the software-implementation projects I’d worked on (not in development but on the server side) back in the days when I was an IT consultant. This seemed a lot faster than anything that any company I’d ever worked with would commit to, even if it had already designed some of the underlying architecture.
They could have delayed the rollout, of course, just like they delayed the employer mandate. But the mandate was a delay that helped them politically and a delay of the exchanges would hurt them politically because it would give the GOP more time to build public opposition to O-Care and maybe even take back the Senate. They’d rather the public be stuck with a defective product whose bugs are being worked out in real time than assume some political risk in the name of getting it right. And so here’s the result on Day 8:
http://www.infowars.com/epic-fail-99-of-obamacare-applications-cant-be-processed-nightmare-scenario-coming-in-january/
Epic fail: 99% of Obamacare applications can’t be processed, ‘nightmare scenario’ coming in January
Obamacare is going to crash and burn from technical issues more than political concerns, it seems. You’ve probably already heard that virtually no one can sign up using the online Obamacare exchanges. The web forms are broken. The code is buggy. The data integration is a jaw-dropping failure.
Image: Obamacare Supporters.
This is why, all over the country and across the media, no one can seem to locate anyone who has successfully signed up through Healthcare.gov. Even the one person the Obama administration rolled out as a “success case” turns out to be completely staged and fabricated.
But there’s even more shocking news about Obamacare that could utterly destroy any credibility the system might have remaining: Of those applications who somehow make it through the broken online sign-up system, 99% can’t be processed and will fail.
99% can’t be processed
According to insurance industry insiders who spoke to CNBC, 99 out of 100 applications don’t contain enough information to result in enrollment.
“…federal officials could face a situation in January in which relatively large numbers of people believe they have coverage starting that month, but whose enrollment applications are have not been processed,” reports CNBC.
“We’re getting incomplete data,” says one source from the insurance industry who goes on to describe the data as “corrupted.”
That’s fitting, of course, as the entire Obama administration is also corrupted. And incompetent. The Obamacare socialism dream turns out to be one big job-destroying frag fest that deceived Americans on every level. Although called the Affordable Care Act, it isn’t “affordable,” the system doesn’t CARE about you, and even when you want it, it’s almost impossible to get the online applications to ACT properly.
Healthcare.gov tricks people into thinking they’re enrolled
The problem is that the Healthcare.gov website doesn’t ask users for sufficient information needed to process their enrollment. The website, in other words, is a joke. It’s a public relations facade. Even when people think they’ve signed up, the system doesn’t have enough information about them to actually complete the enrollment.
So between now and January, even those people who somehow make it through the broken Healthcare.gov website and think they have enrolled will find themselves without any health insurance when January rolls around. Somehow, federal workers are going to have to contact these individuals one at a time and ask them for additional information to process their enrollment.
That process, of course, is fraught with nightmarish scenarios of failure and incompetence. Why? For starters, because the masses of government workers needed to carry out such a follow-up program have never been hired! And that’s because no one anticipated the Obamacare online exchanges would be such a nightmare of technical incompetence in the first place.
Secondly, even if you could hire all these people in the next few weeks, the simple fact of the matter is that support-level people who work for the federal government tend to be people who are really just there for the paycheck and who don’t actually give a crap about whether they are effective in their jobs. This is going to be worse than DMV workers. It’s going to be an office full of extremely unhealthy, over-paid, under-educated, “I-don’t-give-a-s#@t!” workers whose only real mission is to log enough hours to collect a paycheck, not to actually solve problems with Obamacare enrollment. Think TSA workers sitting behind computers all day long…
Obamacare is the ultimate vaporware
More and more people are now realizing that Obamacare is D.O.A. (Dead On Arrival). Most Americans don’t want it and most employers absolutely despise it. Even the few Americans who are interested in the program can’t seem to sign up because the websites are broken (and will remain broken for months). Of those who somehow do manage to complete the enrollment process, 99% will NOT actually be enrolled due to a lack of required information.
This is headed for an absolute P.R. disaster for the Obama administration, which has so far been running on nothing but lies and vapor. Obamacare is, in fact, the ultimate “vaporware” because it makes promises the software simply can’t deliver.
No wonder the Republicans are trying to delay it or defund it. The public cry for precisely such action is only going to gain strength from here forward, especially as January rolls around and potentially millions of people who think they have health insurance suddenly find out they have none whatsoever (even though they signed up and were told they had enrolled).
This is going to create a nightmare scenario with doctors and hospitals, where Obamacare enrollees show up demanding health care services but they don’t actually have insurance. This mess is going to be dumped right in the laps of medical clinics and hospitals, both of which are already suffocating under a tar pit of health insurance paperwork. Add to that a failed, incompetent system of non-coverage courtesy of the Affordable Care Act, and you get a system infested with so many critical failures that it just can’t function.
That’s where Obamacare is headed: An epic fail at every level. Obamacare will long be remembered as the perfect example of what can go wrong when irrational Big Government worshippers shove complex socialist programs down everyone’s throats. It also shows the danger of taking an industry which should be based on a free market and instead trying to force it into a Soviet-style centralized command system run by a corrupt, incompetent government dominated by tyrants and fools.
Defund Obamacare now!
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/07/jay-carney-on-obamacare-enrollment-numbers-uh-well-get-back-to-you-next-month/
Jay Carney on ObamaCare enrollment numbers: Uh, we’ll get back to you next month
POSTED AT 6:41 PM ON OCTOBER 7, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT
If they’re able and willing to release the website’s traffic data, as Carney does here, why can’t they can’t release the number of people who managed to complete the application process successfully? Any website that requires users to register has a way of counting the number of registrants. Carney doesn’t even deny that they have the number; he just says that they’ll release the data monthly like other agencies do, as if there’s no special public interest in the first-day enrollment numbers for ObamaCare. Show of hands: If the site was working like a dream and 500,000 people had signed up successfully in the first 24 hours, who thinks President Bashful would insist on sitting on those numbers for a month?
By the way, per this morning’s post about the real causes of the Healthcare.gov glitchapalooza, O’s team continues to lie their collective ass off in claiming that it’s all due to heavy traffic, not freakishly amateurish coding:
The Obama administration is not planning on releasing enrollment numbers on Obamacare until November, senior administration officials said Monday, as they continued to insist that delays with the healthcare.gov website were entirely the result of high volume…The Wall Street Journal reported Monday, “Information technology experts who examined the healthcare.gov website at the request of The Wall Street Journal said the site appeared to be built on a sloppy software foundation. Such a hastily constructed website may not have been able to withstand the online demand last week, they said. Engineers at Web-hosting company Media Temple Inc. found a glut of stray software code that served no purpose they could identify. They also said basic Web-efficiency techniques weren’t used, such as saving parts of the website that change infrequently so they can be loaded more quickly. Those factors clog the website’s plumbing, Media Temple said.”But the senior administration official rejected suggestions from internet technology experts that the website is poorly designed and flawed.“Volume is the problem,” the official said.
Watch the second clip below, via RCP, and you’ll find Carney kinda sorta repeating this lie himself, insisting that their “top issue” when it comes to the glitches is high volume. In the unlikely event that Carney and the White House actually believe that, it’s good news for O-Care’s opponents: If they’re not aggressively addressing the coding issues on the assumption that more servers will straighten most of this out, the rollout failures will crawl on for months. In the meantime, the solution is — wait for it — “waiting rooms”:
“CMS has put up a gate at the front end of the system that places visitors in a waiting room and lets them in at a particular pace so that the surge in volume does not cause the problems that it caused in the past,” Carney said during Monday’s White House press briefing.
Charlie Spiering describes that, not inaptly, as “rationing” online users. Exit question via aTwitter buddy: Why doesn’t Carney revive ye olde “created or saved” metric for this? Eight million people viewed or enrolled on the ObamaCare website!
Morning Fred, so that guy was captured in 2002 hmm. Looks like they were just looking for photo ops, distractions for the news and showing off our military prowess.
ReplyDeleteI guess it is a bad sign when our decline is being pointed out in the foreign news.
I think we are just hoping that the new leader of Iran is dumber than the last. We just want to see what we can get him to give up without us actually doing anything for them. There is no "good faith" on our side, we would like to be able to infiltrate their society and bring it down from within. We''ll probably demand they get a central bank :)
Morning Kev - funny how Special Forces are sent out to distract ( Bin Laden killing ) when the temperature gets hot for Obama .....
ReplyDeleteAsia just speaking on the obvious......
Iran is playing chess - and they think Obama is weakened and desperate to announce a deal , any deal that he can on Iran's nuclear program , that he will essentially give in to Iran's priorities in the negotiations....