By Liliana Marquez
There’s been a lot of controversy with the Affordable Care Act’s website since its launching last month. People were having problems with it since day one.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said it was “a great problem to have.”
I don’t see how this is something great. The website needed to be in great shape before it’s launching. It was obvious that millions of people were going to visit it.
The more visitors the website has, the more maintenance it will need to prevent problems.
There were big companies hired to take care of the site, but according to CNN, there were also thousands of subcontractors writing computer codes.
The miscommunication between President Barack Obama, the Department of Health and Human Services and subcontractors is also another problem.
CNN also reported that the president’s officials said he was unaware of the mess that was developing because of the lack of communication between the subcontractors.
I think they were all irresponsible. There were so many people involved in this project, that at the end no one knew who was in charge, or what they were doing.
This ended up affecting the consumers who are trying to enroll, but cannot because of the website’s malfunctions.
The shocking part is that due to the problems that the website developed over the course of the first day of the federal exchange, only six people actually enrolled in Obamacare insurance.
Why such a small number? Because of the website service they have. Even the lady that appeared on the website’s homepage, greeting visitors with a smile, has disappeared.
I believe that President Obama and his administration wanted the launching to happen so fast, to help him gain some of the support he has lost recently, that at the end they didn’t carefully supervise the website’s development.
Maybe they thought it was just a website and it wasn’t that big of a deal, as the act is, but I believe that this site is one of the main tools for people who are trying to figure out what to do next.
A memo from the White House identified some of the specific problems the site had last month, “High capacity on the website, direct enrollment not working, VA system not connecting, Experian creating confusion with credit check information.”
“We anticipate the strengthened infrastructure will help eliminate application downtimes,” Verizon spokesman Jeffrey Nelson said.
The Head of the Federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Marilyn Tavenner said that the problems with the website were being solved and that by the end of this month, the “vast majority” of visitors would be able to successfully use the website.
November is here, so I hope that all the people involved in this get their act together and come with a solution to have the website up and running without any more malfunctions.