Amidst all the attention, bugs, and work happening at Healthcare.gov in light of the Affordable Care Act, potential registrants who spoke to phone support today have been told that all user passwords are being reset to help to address the site’s access problems. And the technical support behind Healthcare.gov will be asking more users to work in the name of fixing the site, too. According to registrars speaking with Ars, individuals whose logins are not made to the site’s database will have to re-register using a different username, as previously chosen usernames are now in authentication limbo. .
The website for the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”) launched last week. With all the scrutiny and controversy going on, if ever there was a website launch that was “too big to fail,” this is it. So, of course, it does—depending on how you define “failure.” The inability of the Obamacare portals to keep up with the initial reporting requests put to them has been taken by politicians and conservative experts as proof that Obamacare is “not ready for prime time” in the words of Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). Now, a week later, the site appears to be stable, with surprisingly low wait times for those who weren’t able to sign up earlier.
Testing the site this morning had me waiting four minutes to get to the registration page; others get it right away. But problems stop beyond the front door. The contractor responsible for the Federal-CGI exchange for the website itself, Quality Software Systems Inc. (QSSI) for “portal” information that determines eligibility for programs and provides data on qualified insurance programs, and Booz Allen for enrollment and eligibility technology. Support is scrambling to send more fixes. Technical support center operators continue to take an onslaught of calls from users who cannot return to the system after registration.
In addition to would-be Healthcare.gov registrants who told Ars about password resets and login limbos, Ars learned that changes made to profiles already within the system may not be saved either – a problem pointed out by a very unexplained error. message.
Ars attempted to contact contractors with Healthcare.gov but has not received a response as of this writing.
Based on those Federal IT Dashboard, which tracks project status and risk for most of the federal government’s critical IT programs, it appears that HHS and the Obama Administration have little confidence that the exchange sites will be launched on time. However, they are not confident about finding it under budget. Known as “CMS CCIIO Healthcare Insurance Exchange IT Investment,” the program was assigned a “medium risk” rating (A “3” on a 5 scale) at the end of July. That limitation is not due to concern about the schedule. Instead, the risk rating was chosen because HHS Chief Information Officer Frank Baitman was concerned about the potential costs of implementing the website.
There are even earlier reasons for concern. Back in March, concerns about funding levels for the program led Baitman and the HHS administration to rate the program as “high risk” — giving it a score of 1 out of 5. In June, the Government Accountability Office, an auditing group that not part of providing oversight reports to Congress, said that it was still a crapshoot whether the program would work on time. This uncertainty remains because the station built by QSSI has not been fully tested (the station is responsible for making automatic decisions about selection). While the policies to govern how the station operates—and how many state programs should operate—have been finalized, there is still a lot of code to be written to turn those policies into a real system.
All this brings the development of the program closer and closer to the deadline. As one Reddit user posted when the site ran into trouble on October 1, “My wife worked on this project but was not a developer. Last night she said, ‘I have no idea how the site is going to go live tomorrow.'”
Garbage in, garbage out
The result of the long rush to October 1 is a system that has never been tested in anything like the load experienced on the first day of its operation (if it was tested with loads at all). Those looking for a reason for the terrible performance of the site on its first day have many things to choose from.
First, there is the front-end site itself. The first page of the registration process (once you get to it) has 2,099 lines of HTML code, but it also calls for 56 JavaScript files and 11 CSS files. That’s not ideal for heavy load pages. .
Navigating the site once you get past registration is something of a cheese search through a mouse maze. “It’s like a bad, boring video game where you try to grunt and hack your way to the next step,” one site user told Ars.
Once you get all that, it’s not clear that it will do you any good. Underlying problems in the back-end code—including the database created by QSSI—are causing errors in determining whether individuals are eligible for subsidy plans under the program. In DC, that means that health care plan fees will not be available for people enrolling through the DC portal until November. It could also mean that others who are already enrolled in federal and state exchanges may get sticker shock later.
Occasional Ars contributor Jason Levitt contributed to this report.