Roshan Ravishankar ’14: Hundreds of thousands of Americans logged onto healthcare.gov on October 1st in order to manage their health insurance. The day should have been a rousing success for President Obama’s new healthcare plan, but prospects turned sour when the website faltered. Only about 1% of users were able to purchase health insurance through the site. To make matters worse, the incident occurred on the same day as the government shut down, putting Obama’s policy under considerable scrutiny.
And now, weeks later, even with the government’s open, the problem has not been fully resolved. Thus, it is imperative that the government improve the site immediately if it wishes to make its medical reforms a reality.
Many wonder why the site failed. Perhaps it did because the government did not expect such a high volume of users. The expected traffic was 50-60 thousand visitors at a given time, but Chief Technology Officer Todd Park has stated that the actual number of simultaneous visitors has peaked as high as 250,000. “These bugs were functions of volume,” Park said. “Take away the volume and it works.” But given the considerable magnitude of the administration’s attempted reforms, it is odd that the government under-prepared itself to such an extent. Technology experts told USA Today that the technology used for the site was insufficient regardless, stating, “the federal health care exchange was built using 10-year-old technology that may require constant fixes and updates for the next six months and the eventual overhaul of the entire system.” Whether the site designers underestimated traffic or did not effectively utilize all the technology available to them, it is clear that the administration has committed a serious blunder.
Poor execution aside, the administration now needs to do everything possible to ameliorate this error. The web sites performance will both deter individuals from benefitting from Obama’s reforms and also dampen the citizens’ trust in the system. If the administration truly wishes to make its reforms a reality allowing the issue to linger will be a huge mistake. And if the administration does not work to properly provide the service it has fought so hard to have the power to provide, all may be for nothing.