President Obama got on TV to assure us the Healthcare.gov website will be fixed and if you want to skip the web site you can call a 1-800 number. Uh, the 1-800 number has problems too.
There was only one problem: the Obamcare toll-free phone number was overloaded and immediately crashed. According to Lou Dubois of NBC News, "Call centers now appear overloaded due to volume. 'Please call back.'" Dubois wasn't the only one reporting the new glitches. Annie Lowrey of The New York Times added, "For the record, just called 1-800-318-2596, got a busy signal." Kasie Hunt of NBC News: "Just called the number. They said there's too high call volume and call back on the weekend. 'We're sorry for the inconvenience. Goodbye.'"
The author goes on to point out a flaw in using the 1800 phone system.
There was only one problem: the Obamcare toll-free phone number was overloaded and immediately crashed. According to Lou Dubois of NBC News, "Call centers now appear overloaded due to volume. 'Please call back.'" Dubois wasn't the only one reporting the new glitches. Annie Lowrey of The New York Times added, "For the record, just called 1-800-318-2596, got a busy signal." Kasie Hunt of NBC News: "Just called the number. They said there's too high call volume and call back on the weekend. 'We're sorry for the inconvenience. Goodbye.'"
The Washingpost focuses on the damage control and Obama's speech pretty much ignores the significance of the problems.
"Hasn't worked as smoothly as it was supposed to work" is an understatement. "Hasn't worked" is closer to the truth.
But you wouldn't have known that from Obama's speech. Most of it was dedicated to the good the federal health-care law is already doing. The president emphasized that the Affordable Care Act "is not just a Web site." It's a Medicaid expansion, and it's got consumer protections, and delivery-system reforms, and all of those are ongoing.
The Washingpost highlights that the website operation is critical for the legalize and success of Obamacare.
The problem is that much of the law is a Web site. When the White House defined what it would mean for the Affordable Care Act to be a success, that definition ran right through the Web site. And Obama knows the Web site needs to be fixed. "We've had some of the best IT talent in the entire country join the team," he promised. "And we're well into a tech surge to fix the problem. And we are confident that we will get all the problems fixed."
I don't know about you, but a bunch of my friends are getting some good laughs.
As we all know developing solutions that need to scale to millions of users is really hard. The US government has never had a system that has millions of users regularly using a website as individual users.
In the end despite all the posturing by Obama, and the Best IT talent in the country, we'll see if Obamacare succeeds or not.
In the end, though, Obama's speech doesn't matter. Either the Web site will be fixed in a reasonable time frame, and the law will work, or it won't be fixed and the law will begin to fail. The Affordable Care Act is no longer a political abstraction. It's the law, and it will be judged not on how well politicians message it, but how much it does to improve people's lives.
