Question

Why Healthcare.gov came out broken

Under the Affordable Care Act, every American is now required to have health insurance. The government set up Healthcare.gov, a website that was supposed to be the easiest way for everyone to get enrolled -- only it didn't work. What happened?

Discussion Question :

Suggest the different reasons due to which systems fail.

Answer 1

ANSWER:

On 1 October 2013 Healthcare.gov was officially launched. It was covering residents of 36 states that were not managing and creating their own healthcare exchange. The main issues with the website were apparent immediately. The website was heavily in demand (250,000 users [five times more than expected]) were the primary cause that within 2 hours of launch the website goes down. While website capacity was initially cited as the primary problem, additional issues arose mainly due to the incompletion of the website design. The users cited concerns such as drop down menus not being complete and insurance companies cited problems with user data being incomplete or incorrect when it reached them. Furthermore the websites login feature (which is the initial step for accessing the website) could handle even less traffic than the main website which lead to a huge bottleneck. Because of the lack of planning, this same log in method was also used by website technicians, making it very tough for them to log in and troubleshoot issues.

The main problems experienced during the websites rollout were due to various factors, primarily:

-- Lack of relevant experience: HHS management and employees had a lot of experience with private insurance markets and maintaining large government projects, however lacked experience in technology product launches.

-- Lack of leadership: It lacked formal division of responsibilities in place among the several government offices involved which lead to a delay in key decision making or a lack of communication when main decisions were made.

-- Schedule pressure: As the date of launch was mandated in the Affordable Care Act, HHS management were pressured to launch on time regardless of completion or the amount (and results) of troubleshooting and testing performed