I gotta say I don't really get these articles. What's the point? Triumph in someone else's mistakes?<p>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?<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.
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.<p>Medicare was successfully delivering care decades before the web was even invented and we all somehow survived.
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.<p>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 _.@/-."<p>Requiring entropy in the <i>username</i>? What? I can understand the password, but what site requires you to put a symbol in your username?
> 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.<p>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.
From my experience, yes the site is really bad, and it's more than just heavy traffic.<p>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 <i>end</i> a username in a special character, which wasn't mentioned on the signup page, and which I only added at the end because <i>that</i> page wouldn't let me through <i>without</i> one)<p>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.<p>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...
Here's the repo of healthcare.gov is anyone is interested in addressing some of the optimization issues mentioned in the article:<p><a href="https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov</a>
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.<p>In the meantime, we (software developers) can help. Data is widely available. I made one info graphic:<p><a href="http://vida.io/discussion/SuRAGDs7J78HCvoxE" rel="nofollow">http://vida.io/discussion/SuRAGDs7J78HCvoxE</a><p>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."<p>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.
They must've hired a well-known team of web developers from elance:<p><a href="http://toprate.org/FILES/programmers.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://toprate.org/FILES/programmers.jpg</a>