Don't be fooled by the rhetoric about our nation's health portal: From a technical standpoint, there's no excuse for its failures.
The disastrous rollout of Obamacare's online health insurance marketplace at HealthCare.gov has been blamed on traffic overload, other connected systems that were unreliable and "routine" glitches.
Those excuses were valid a decade ago, but not today. Not with the advanced software architecture and cloud storage capabilities that currently exist to solve all the stated problems.
Any semi-capable software developer can now test how a site will react to traffic loads. The HealthCare.gov developers should have been able to simulate the massive rush to the site and tweak as needed. One must conclude they either knew it was going to crash or never bothered to test.
Untold numbers of people were turned away at the site's front door, and many others were stymied further along the process by myriad errors. Even yesterday, the site remained painfully slow.
They had three years and more than $400 million for this project. It is estimated to cost more than $700 million upon completion. It would be an understatement to say that a botched rollout of this magnitude would be unacceptable in the private sector.
As if that wasn't infuriating for advocates (like me!) and detractors of universal health care alike, the Obama administration has also made the incredible claim that it purchased more servers to prevent traffic-related crashes, meaning that its data was being stored on-site. That would mean the health care marketplace is making little or no use of the computing cloud, the most fundamental innovation for data storage in recent years.
But even if there was a reason that cloud computing could not be used, and even if developers had no way to anticipate the level of traffic, some basic software architecture solutions could have prevented the bulk of issues.
Think about when you order something from Amazon. You order what you need, and then behind the scenes, the system starts working. It must communicate with its inventory mechanisms, prompt a distribution facility for shipment and process a credit card transaction. Now, does Amazon crash when one of those steps fails? Of course not. It keeps trying behind the scenes and emails you later to confirm your transaction or alert you of a problem. These steps don't need to be done instantly.
The same goes for the Obamacare portal. Consumers should have been able to fill out a form and receive their response later via email.
Maybe there are good reasons for HealthCare.gov to pose a bigger problem than we know.
But no one has pointed to a plausible explanation. And after three years and nearly a billion dollars, a better explanation is desperately needed.
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