Obamacare glitches worse than initially reported

It appears that, after Week One, the Obamacare online health exchanges are malfunctioning much worse than initially reported.

Over the weekend, the Obama administration shut down these Internet portals during the evening hours to make fixes. Officials said today the improvements will boost the speed of these sites by one-third. The problem is, one-third of zero is still zero.

All across the country, millions of people were either unable to get on healthcare.gov (or their state’s site) or were quickly knocked off shortly after gaining initial access.

As an experiment, I tried to go on the Michigan section of the federal site several times a day from Tuesday’s rollout through Friday and never got far enough to actually look at the 50 plans offered in the Detroit area.

The Obama administration said the huge amount of traffic on these sites caused the glitches. That’s understandable for the first few hours, not for the first four days. How could the Health and Human Services Department not be prepared for 

a rush of potential shoppers in the opening days?

The haphazard approach taken in this endeavor sounds like a Saturday Night Live skit. In fact, it was. On the program’s weekly news segment, the new co-anchor, Cecily Strong, asked how the administration could offer insurance for millions of people and then not be prepared when millions of people show up online for insurance.

“That’s kinda like 1-800-FLOWERS being caught by surprise by Valentine’s Day,” Strong joked.

This reminds me of the incompetence demonstrated when the White House announced months ago that the insurance requirements for businesses with 50 or more employees (not “Big Business,” as heard in the talking points) would be delayed for one year. They had three years to set up this system, which affects less than 4 percent of employers, and they failed to meet their deadline.

Now, administration officials are comparing the technical problems the exchanges for individuals have experienced to the glitches experienced during rollouts by major tech companies, such as Apple.

“If Apple launched a major new product that functioned as badly as Obamacare's online insurance marketplace, the tech world would be calling for (CEO) Tim Cook's head,” responded Ezra Klein of The Washington Post.

On his “Wongblog” site, Klein noted that a group of computer geeks had created a thread on Reddit.com in which they vilified the exchange portals for a series of inexcusable mistakes in coding and set-up. Klein, like myself, had trouble even getting the site to accept a chosen user name.

“Yes, the overwhelming crush of traffic is behind many of the web site's failures. But the web site was clearly far, far from prepared for traffic at anywhere near these levels,” Klein wrote. “That's a planning flaw: The Obama administration badly underestimated the level of interest. The fact that the traffic is good news for the law doesn't obviate the fact that the site's inability to absorb that traffic is bad news for the law.”

The result is that, as today dawned, it appeared that hardly anyone in America had actually signed up for a private plan through Obamacare. Officials were not releasing any figures for enrollment on the federal site.

Last week, a 21-year-old student from Georgia emerged in local media as one of that state’s first customers to sign up. It turned out that he was the only successful applicant the national media could find anywhere.

“…Health care reporters were desperately trying to find even one,” Klein wrote. “Eventually, Chad Henderson of Georgia was located. He was subsequently interviewed by pretty much every news organization in the country. According to his Facebook page, he was also asked to be on a conference call put on by the Department of Health and Human Services, which suggests that they're not exactly overwhelmed with successful applicants to trot out before the press.”