Dying HealthCare.gov bagged JUST SIX registrations on first day

The much-maligned US HealthCare.gov medical-insurance portal managed to process just six registrations on its first day of availability. A series of notes [PDF] from the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight (CCIIO) suggest that as problems plagued the healthcare registration site in its opening hours, only a …

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Is this really an IT issue?

Perhaps all Americans have such healthy suyperman-like physiques that they never need to consider health care.

And those that do are so well served by the systems provided by their benevolent employers that they wouldn't need this service.

[keithpeter]

Re: Is this really an IT issue?

"And those that do are so well served by the systems provided by their benevolent employers that they wouldn't need this service."

http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/insured/

Some don't have employers. Seems odd to make things harder for the ones with original ideas.

The tramp: I would be in the States having been partially self employed for quite a long time.

[Moof]

Re: Is this really an IT issue?

I am self-employed and currently pay about 1200//mo for health insurance. I want NOTHING to do with the government controlling our healthcare. As a developer, I wouldn't put my name on that website. Unbelievable. The major issue I have with it is my insurance covers 100% over 5k and I can have a healthcare savings account. Obamacare's choices are less than that and cost me more (for the family). What especially gets my goat is they are going to tax me 1% of my earnings if I don't cave, going up to 2.5% in a couple years.

[keithpeter]

Re: Is this really an IT issue?

@Moof

I'm genuinely interested: is that $1200 per month, i.e. $14400 per year, for you and your family? And is that $5000 excess for the whole year or per condition/incident?

[phil dude]

Re: Is this really an IT issue?

wow that is expensive! is that a gold plated plan?

Here in TN I have been given rates. Bronze $120 , Platinum $285 ,Blue cross Blue Sheild.

The only difference in Bronze/Silver/Gold/Platinum is the ratio of insurance/patient.

e.g. Bronze 60/40....Platinum 90/10

There is some clause about maximum out of pocket being ~$6300 so that makes 120/mth 1440/year +5k deductible about what it was before.

I don't know why it is so much cheaper here in TN, but it could be land prices....?

P.

[Jamie Jones]

Re: Is this really an IT issue?

" Iam self-employed and currently pay about 1200//mo for health insurance. I want NOTHING to do with the government controlling our healthcare."

And if it wasn't for your corrupt system in the first place, you'd be unlucky to have to pay as much as a tenth of that.

Still, you can obviously afford it: "I'm alright Jack"

Lets just hope you don't get seriously ill, and are unable to make the payments. every man for himself - It's the American way, after all!

[ BBC News ] Healthcare around the world

[John Smith 19]

Re: Is this really an IT issue?

"Lets just hope you don't get seriously ill, and are unable to make the payments. every man for himself - It's the American way, after all!"

Provided of course it's on the list of conditions the policy covers.

If not he'd better have the cash handy.

Lots of cash.

[Billl]

Re: Is this really an IT issue?

The reason it's broken is because of the draconian government rules now. Health insurers cannot compete across State borders, for one! The Feds will make the health care system worse for everyone, instead of great for most. The system was broken, but this is not the fix!

Actual free markets is the answer, not more government control. The incompetent website is not what's wrong with Obamacare. Governments are inherently incompetent. Free, regulated, markets are the answer. When I say, regulated, I don't mean making more rules so that the Pols get more money/control, but so that Free Markets are actually protected (protect us from monopolies and unfair competitive practices).

The middle class is once again being told to give to the poor, at gun point. Don't believe it? Try not paying your taxes, see what happens.

[poopypants]

@Moof (Re: Is this really an IT issue?)

Mine is free. Of course, I don't have the advantage of living in the US, so I have to put up with a meddling government that insists that I'm never hungry, homeless or unable to pay for medical treatment.

Fortunately everyone in the US is well off, so those problems simply don't arise where you live.

[T. F. M. Reader]

Re: @Moof (Is this really an IT issue?)

@poopypants: Not arguing quality of medical care or convenience or defending the Merkin system or anything, but I strongly suspect you delude yourself if you think yours is free. Not knowing where you live I'll venture a guess that you pay your taxes in one form or another. A fairer statement is that you do not know of-hand how much your health insurance costs.

[James Micallef]

Re: @Moof (Is this really an IT issue?)

" you do not know of-hand how much your health insurance costs."

Most likely he doesn't know how much of his personal taxes end up in NHS budget, however the aggregate per-person healthcare spending of USA vs rest-of-the-developed-world are well known, and most likely what he's paying in taxes that go towards healthcare is around half what he would pay in the USA

[Filippo]

Re: Is this really an IT issue?

It's quite impressive to a foreigner that you consider 1200$/mo PLUS up to 5K$ in case something happens to be a good deal. The mind boggles at considering what would be considered a bad deal - death, I guess?

[codejunky]

Re: Is this really an IT issue?

@ Filippo

"It's quite impressive to a foreigner that you consider 1200$/mo PLUS up to 5K$ in case something happens to be a good deal. The mind boggles at considering what would be considered a bad deal - death, I guess?"

I live in the UK so I only know through friends and family in the US but foreigners pay a lot more generally. Our food is dearer, our products, housing, tax, etc. I was shocked that something that would cost £60 in petrol/gas to fill up in the UK cost roughly £5 when I was on holiday over there.

I say this without justifying or condemning but I can see the different points of view. In the UK we hide the cost. It gets taken without us seeing it and if you have a gov like the last lot they will give your money away to hire a tonne of managers while sacking nurses (at the same hospital I will add). Our system is far from perfect however odd or unfair we may think their system is.

[Tom 13]

Re: It's quite impressive to a foreigner that you consider 1200$/mo PLUS

That's a bargain actually. We pay for the R&D your governments leach from to maintain the illusion you are paying less for your insurance. Also note he's self-employed and talking about a Health Savings Account for a whole family. Typical family insurance pre-0bamacare in the US ran between $475 and $675/month for the worker. And the worker paid anywhere from 20-40% of the cost with the employer picking up the rest. Cheap when you work out that we were actually paying healthcare for ourselves, the uninsured, and picking up 80% or the R&D costs for the rest of the world. And that doesn't include straight up charity donations which don't figure into the official numbers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Is this really an IT issue?

This isn't a government issue, they just tend not to be able to hide their screw-ups.

Three UK had a many-million-UKP IT infrastructure that could only hande 3 call centre operators (ironically) on its first day. If a forth user logged in (they didn't neet to do anything else), the all of the CRM, billing, and everything else in range, systems went into a tragic meltdown requiring about a man-year of effort to get up and running again.

[Anonymous Coward]

So something like $400M-$500M has been spent on this website....

To register 6 people the first day vs. an overall target of 7 million by March 31st of next year!? The federal site covers about 2/3 of the states in the U.S. and probably needs to average about 25,000-30,000 enrollments a day to take care of it's part of that target!!

(FYI--Obamacare/Affordable Care Act allows individual states to run their own health insurance exchanges, and some, like California, Oregon and Minnesota have done that--but about 2/3 of the states told the Feds to take care of this for them. FYI, states running their own exchanges seem to be doing OK as far as web portal reliability so far.)

This might be a new low in federal procurement incompetence. Have we been charged $2,000 for an Obamacare-related screwdriver or cable stripper yet?

[Kurgan]

Re: So something like $400M-$500M has been spent on this website....

So we italians are not alone. Our government spent 45 millions Euros on the useless "italia.it" website.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: So something like $400M-$500M has been spent on this website....

Pah amateurs

The UK spent more than that on the acronym for each of the last 'n' abandoned NHS-IT systems

[ecofeco]

Re: So something like $400M-$500M has been spent on this website....

The only reports I've seen say the CGI Federal was paid $94 million.

If you have other information, please let us know.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: So something like $400M-$500M has been spent on this website....

According to the GAO and Washington Post, the whole site + data mart and call centers is running at about $394 million so far.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/10/24/how-much-did-healthcare-gov-cost/

[T. F. M. Reader]

Re: So something like $400M-$500M has been spent on this website....

"If you have other information, please let us know."

If you insist... CNN quote $174M invoiced so far with more bills coming.

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/30/politics/obamacare-sebelius/

CBS quote much higher numbers including partial breakdown for states that decided to build their own "exchanges":

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505263_162-57610154/states-insurance-exchange-websites-cost-taxpayers-$1b-contractors-often-paid-to-do-same-job-in-different-states/

CGI only did a part of the work on the system.

The $500M figure was previously quoted by El Reg - maybe they can disclose the source for the number.

Most likely you'll never get a straight answer from either US government or reporters.

[ecofeco]

Re: So something like $400M-$500M has been spent on this website....

Thanks for the references. I'll check those out.

[Tom 13]

Re: states running their own exchanges

That's a misleading statement. The early information even from the State exchanges is that they aren't signing up 0bamacare people, mostly they are signing up Medicare/Medicaid recipients. The typical response, assuming you've slogged through the signup process is 'Fuck it, I'll pay the fine instead. If I run into trouble then I'll get insurance because now they can't turn me down for a pre-existing condition.'

[mraak]

Sebelius

Is the new word for government incompetence and over spending. Were it done by even the most expensive tech firm, the cost might be below 100m, and at least one person would test it.

During the commonwealth games in India, many cases of sebelius were reported, but weren't properly investigated due to sebelius that is widespread in Indian government.

Investing in solar energy turned out to be a sebelius for Obama administration.

Can somebody put that into dictionary please?

[ecofeco]

Re: Sebelius

See my post above.

CGI Federal was paid $94 million.

If you also have other information, please let us know.

[asdf]

politics aside

The tech "surge" and bringing in experts at the 11th hour to save the day makes me think everything won't be rosy by the end of November. Sounds like someone in the administration needs to read The Mythical Man Month. You know that new fangled book describing this exact kind of situation that is older than the majority of readers on here.

[TaabuTheCat]

Re: politics aside

No kidding. Talk about 9 women trying to make a baby in one month...

[Anonymous Coward]

My experience

Been there done that. Started trying to get an app processed on October 2nd. I had trouble in the beginning with the Experian interface where they ask you a bunch of questions about old phone numbers you might have had, places you used to live, recent credit transactions, etc. Apparently I got one of the many questions wrong (I think it was a really old phone number I missed) and I failed the identity verification. The site threw up a popup with a "reference number" directing me to call Experian to get it fixed. Silly me, I apparently didn't write down the number properly (should have just screen-shotted the damned thing) and when I called they couldn't identify the reference number and without that, no help.

OK, great. No hurry here, I'll just pop back to the site and get the number again. I log back in the next day and whoa - my identity shows up as "Verified". Great, guess I passed after all. My application shows as "incomplete" so I go back and and answer all the questions again and hit the point where it asks me to verify my identity, so I click continue and it says it's "In progress". You can only guess the rest. Days later same thing - app shows "incomplete", answer all the questions *again*, hit submit, "Processing...:".

OK, I admit it. I'm stupid. I did this three more times over the last two weeks, hoping beyond hope that it was just a systems glitch and they would get it fixed. Well, last night I was done playing. A month had gone by and still no progress, so I did a web chat (that finally worked!) with the oh-so-helpful support folks for the site, and after explaining all of this to them and practically begging for the reference number (nowhere to be found apparently) about 10 minutes later they tell me I need to "mail" them a copy of my driver's license, passport, something that will let them identify me. Oh - and no answer why my profile still shows my identity as "Verified".

I'm sure this will scale well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: My experience

@AC--icon shows expected outcome of process you described.

[BongoJoe]

Re: My experience

As an aside I registered for an NS&I account the other day where in the UK so that I could do stuff with my Premium Bonds. I was told to choose a password which had to have upper and lower case characters, numeric characters and at least one special character.

After failing to have a password approved by the system ("You must have at least one special character") despite the thing being littered with them, I was forced to ring the help desk.

Many levels of security questions later I found out that 'special characters' didn't include $, %, * and anything with those in (clearly concerned about SQL injection) would be rejected. But was there any indication of this anywhere on their site or literature? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Best promotion ever.

Since this is selling a product people have to get, what better why to get a bunch of people promoting it for free. Had the site worked smoothly, no one would know about it. It would have gotten a 30 second mention on evening news and that's it. Now it getting 1+ month coverage. Hell, I even went to it to see it not working even though I did not need insurance, but it worked ofcourse.

All the suckers falling for this, can believe it.

[MrMur]

Mythical man month...

... only really applies when the people in situ know what they are doing but they are just doing it too slowly. Now, if you have a bunch of fuckwits in-situ (no idea if that is the case) , then getting non-fuckwit people in can only help. Of course, if it has just been designed badly, then neither fuckwits nor non-fuckwits will be able to fix it.

[Tom 13]

Re: Mythical man month...

'Designed" you say? Go flog yourself 40 times! That's not how government works. Government just speaks it and it happens.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mmmmmh... RedHat... Google

So nobody blaming the OS? Imagine if Microsoft experts were brought in, what we would have read here...

And I'm really worried Google can put its nose into such sensitive data...

[Anonymous Coward]

Standard behavior here

There will be fines for those who do not get their insurance, whether the government site works or not. Impossibility is NO EXCUSE, and the taxman will get his money!

There is a similar government fund-raising measure in the gasoline industry. Refiners are mandated to blend a certain amount of cellulosic alcohol into their fuel. There are no plants producing commercial quantities of such alcohol. Therefore, the government will fine the refiners for not using any. Who cares if it couldn't be gotten?

[kns2c]

Apologies to the US government

I made four of those six registrations. Please delete the following accounts:

kns55health

kns55attempt2

kns55thisisgettingridiculous

You can leave this one, I have finally been able to log in with it:

kns55areyoufuckingkiddingmehowmanymoretimesdoihavetodothis

[ecofeco]

I had no problem as of yesterday

See title.

Everything seems to be working fine now.

[kns2c]

What really pisses me off about this whole mess is that even now, a full month after well publicized issues there is not a single word on the website itself about the real status of it. There are some blog entries on the front page but these are written in typical gov-speak and don't really say anything about what to expect if you are looking to register on the site or god forbid apply for insurance.

They should have a clear plain-language status, potential wait times for identity verification, eligibility check, and other slow parts of the application, and any other details that could save time and frustration for potential users. They are promoting "4 ways" to apply for coverage, however if you call the provided phone number or contact one of the 3rd party "helpers" you'll find out that they are using the same system that is broken the same way the public website is. Not sure how application "by mail" would work, might try that next.

I was not able to get a status of my application over the phone, the person who answered didn't even ask for my application ID and just told me to check back later. Guess what - a week later the status of the application still shows as "incomplete" in one place on the website, and "complete" in another. However the page that shows "complete" doesn't work - clicking on a "Continue" button doesn't do anything. How hard could it be to show a proper message if there is an issue, or just disable the damn thing if it's not working - why have users banging at it?

Unfortunately that's how the whole site seems to be developed - a mess of incoherent links and buttons, no error handling whatsoever, sprinkled with typical bureaucratic nonsense (six or seven clicks to confirm that my 11-month old makes $0 per year). At least they made it enormously bloated aka "touch friendly" so that fondleslab users could enjoy the same level of waste, incompetence, and stupidity.

[T. F. M. Reader]

So they tested the system before launch

roughly as well as Obama prepares to important international meetings?

[Tom 13]

Re: So they tested the system before launch

No. The Big 0's preparation work for those is 2 orders of magnitude larger than the testing for this site. As in, in a commercial setting this wouldn't have even passed the initial design review phase. You had at least three government agencies designing their "portion" of the site without reference to the designs from the other participating agencies.