Healthcare.gov is a Technological Disaster
Posted on October 1, 2013 by Luke Chung-FMS
blog.fmsinc.com 
Finally Here
October 1, the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) websitehttp://www.healthcare.gov/ finally went live today.
I was eager to personally review what was being offered and cut through the hoopla and criticism. I had previously written FMS Receives Health Insurance Premium Refund from the Affordable Care Act, so my expectations were high.
From the previously published rates for Virginia, the cost of insurance premiums for individuals and families was considerably lower than what FMS currently pays for our group plan. Business plans aren’t available yet, but the individual plans should be a good indicator. I wasn’t interested in the subsidies, I simply wanted to know the prices for the different plan options.
Applying for Coverage
So I went online to healthcare.gov around 5:30 AM to apply for my family and see what it would cost. As expected, you create a login with email confirmation, and fill out a Wizard to select the options. It’s similar to many other instances I’ve applied online for credit cards and other forms of insurance. How tough could it be? Technically, it’s a very simple data entry application that should generate a quote at the end.
What a Mess!
Unfortunately, what should be a simple process is a complete disaster. The logical flow of the application to register, login, and fill out the data for a family was horrendously inefficient. It seemed like the person who designed it, never had to use it. Or maybe didn’t have a family which required filling out the same information for each member of the family.
OVERLY COMPLEX DATA ENTRY
I not only had to identify my spouse, my two kids, their relationship to me, but also their relationship to my wife, and even their relationship to each other! What? Given the prior information, obvious defaults could be offered.The selection of race was also more complicated than it should be. Here’s an idea that may not have occurred to the designers: Maybe the kids should default to inherit their parents’ races. That’s how it works.
The system crashed several times for me, and had problems when I logged back in. It seemed like the system wasn’t even tested. Here are some screenshots:
SCREENSHOT 1: GIBBERISH 
(click the graphic to see an enlarged version)
What the hell is that? How could that get through testing much less production?
SCREENSHOT 2: ERROR FORM WITH NO DATA 
Having error handling to catch unexpected crashes is a best practice in application development. It should tell the user what went wrong, what to do next, and gracefully exit the system. This page does none of that. The error message and error number are blank. Who knows what went wrong? Useless and amateurish.
SCREENSHOT 3: CASCADING ERRORS 
In this screenshot a series of errors appear to be triggered without meaningful explanation. Embarrassing.
Logging Back in and Repeating
If anything, I’m persistent. I not only had my original goal to see the premium prices, I was now intrigued to discover how poorly designed, developed and tested this application was. Eventually, I was able to finish. Took about an hour.
However, rather than receiving a quote immediately, it’s now being “processed”. For what? It shouldn’t be held up for pre-existing conditions. I would expect it to be some mathematical, logical formula that would generate the results. Although my application is submitted, given the crashes, I’m not sure what data it has. We’ll see.
Authors of Healthcare.govA few months ago, I read this article about how the site was being built and was impressed: Healthcare.gov: Code Developed by the People and for the People, Released Back to the People
In hindsight, it appears the authors have a philosophical bias toward OpenSource and “people power.” That’s all fine and dandy if it works, but this site doesn’t. To deliver such low quality results requires multiple process breakdowns. It just proves you can create bad solutions independent of the choice of technology.
Technical Software Conclusions
What should clearly be an enterprise quality, highly scalable software application, felt like it wouldn’t pass a basic code review. It appears the people who built the site don’t know what they’re doing, never used it, and didn’t test it.
It makes me wonder if this is the first paid application created by the developers. How much did the contractor get paid for this awful solution? Was it awarded to the lowest price bidder? As a taxpayer, I hope we didn’t didn’t pay a premium for this quality because it needs to be rebuilt. And fixing, testing, and redeploying a live application like this is non-trivial.
Our Professional Solutions Group has created many mission-critical, custom software applications where scalability, reliability and quality are paramount. I know what’s involved in creating great software, and this ain’t it. As a software developer, I’m embarrassed for my profession. If FMS ever delivered such crap, I’d be personally inconsolable. This couldn’t pass an introductory computer science class.
Overall Conclusions
This is going to be a huge public relations mess that could doom the whole initiative. The application process asks too many unnecessary questions and repeatedly crashes.Since 9 AM and as of right now, the site no longer lets you apply. I presume it got overloaded or someone finally discovered how broken it is and pulled the plug. Given what I experienced, it needs to be offline until it’s corrected.
Of course, software problems with the application process are not the reason to abandon healthcare reform. As a small business owner, we face the highest premiums for the lowest coverage.I applaud the efforts to reform health insurance and look forward to working in a constructive, rather than destructive, manner to improve this. I presume once these issues are resolved, I’ll have more options for my company and employees than I did before. In the big picture, this website is much easier to fix than health insurance. We’ll see.
This entry was posted in Government, Health Insurance and tagged ACA, Obamacare by Luke Chung-FMS. Bookmark the permalink.
About Luke Chung-FMS
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