Oct 21 2013
Healthcare.gov – Can the Government Healthcare Website Be Fixed? @HealthCareGov #GetCovered

Healthcare.gov is the US Government’s website to deliver a platform for people in the US to signup for healthcare.

The site has been plagued by outages, error pages, issues with processing. Yet the government is asking everyone to consider joining. While the site performs more than just informational services and is processing applications, the site had a lot riding on it before the launch several weeks ago.  The Health and Human Services Department failed to deliver a stable solid platform able to deliver.  Now President Obama is having to apologize to all those who have tried to use the site and not been able to as well as encourage those who have not even been to the site after hearing all the negative buzz.

There has been much discussion about the company that was selected for the building of the site, CGI Federal, a subsidary of a Canadian firm called CGI Group. A Canadian company was selected to build a US Government website? Yes.  Why? When in fact CGI Federal has little to little experience in the Government space, and on top of that was paid close to $100 million($93.7) to build the site! CGI is hiring for the project, as example see this position

With over 500,000 applications to date, the site is surely getting lots of traffic, in  the millions of hits per day with users trying to retrieve information on the process.  Over 19 million unique visitors since the launch, which each visit is at least 2-3 pages.  And if you have troubles with the site you can try to connect but using social media or leaving feedback.

https://www.healthcare.gov/connect/

twitter: @HealthCareGov

hashtag: #GetCovered

Large scale enterprise and consumer experts should have been brought in before the launch. Now we hear that over 5 million lines of code needs to be written to fix the site and it could not be ready until mid December 2013.

Can the Obama administration fix the issues quickly with what they term a “tech surge” which is basically bringing in experts from other parts of the government and outside experts to fix the site.   read more on what is being done on a blog posting by the HHS here

 

So this failure to deliver a stable platform, yet the Government wants everyone to signup, I guess you can try and report your errors.

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