General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Weirdly, the people complaining about the healthcare website not working after three weeks... [View all]Yo_Mama
(8,303 posts)Even if the backend processing for the exchanges is very complex, there is literally no excuse for making people struggle for hours to set up an account to find information. That part is simple and isolated.
They're talking about volume, but the site's basic failures created a great deal of the volume as people try and try and try again.
There is a design failure - why make people "apply" to just get information? There are communication failures. There is the basic failure involved with setting up an account.
Then once all that gets solved, it moves to the far more difficult processing stages of sending the info to the insurance companies, getting info back, and handling the determinations and processing of the advance tax credits which have to be transmitted every month to the insurance companies.
I still have some hope that telecom lines haven't been put in, and that when they do get up and running some of these problems will go away. I had heard that rumor before, and it would explain a lot. But if that is true, someone missed the most essential part of setting up this system. It looks like the people in charge of setting it up literally did not know what had to be done, and the people in charge of setting it up work at CMS - CMS decided that they would contract the system themselves. So they hired the private firms piecemeal and were responsible for giving each group the specs, but perhaps they did not know what is involved in setting up this type of system.
Nor does anything that the administration is telling us make it look like they understand the problems even now.