A discussion of the suggestion regarding the possibility of theoretically firing someone over #obamacare.

My, don’t they sound confident:

White House officials, asserting that the HealthCare.gov website is largely fixed, are under mounting pressure from Democrats and close allies to hold senior-level people accountable for the botched rollout of President Obama’s signature domestic achievement and to determine who should be fired.

Via

Rick noted the ‘May,’ which is significant; but even moreso is the NYT’s understandable hesitance in simply taking the White House’s word for it that the website is fixed.  Admittedly, there’s a reason for that:

To handle overload on Healthcare.gov, the administration has implemented a “feature” that asks locked-out visitors to provide their email addresses so that the system can notify them when the site has room. Imagine any other online retail site in A/B testing such an option in 2013.

These days, e-commerce sites don’t succeed on cost or selection as much as “customer experience.” By that measure, it’s hard to imagine something that sucks more than “queuing.” Would anyone really go back to Amazon to buy something later if they were blocked out the first time? The feds might as well put up an “under construction” GIF and be done with it.

It’s on this last point that the fate of Obamacare truly depends. After more than a decade-and-a-half of Amazon, not to mention the rest of the internet, an expectation threshold has been set. If a certain standard of performance isn’t met, people will go elsewhere. Since would-be buyers of health insurance in 36 states have no other options, many of them will simply not bother, regardless of the individual mandate.

That’s from Wired.com, which is normally what I would consider friendly territory for Democrats – or at least Barack Obama. If they’re not thrilled with Healthcare.gov’s design architecture, well…

2 thoughts on “A discussion of the suggestion regarding the possibility of theoretically firing someone over #obamacare.”

  1. The website fiasco is something that many people “get”. Any successful techie has one or more of these in their past. The whole thing smells of “fail”. Requirements constantly changing…political implications (happens in business too)…system integrations with 3rd party systems…PII and Health data to secure…unrealistic deadlines…and on and on and on. It hits on just about every anti-pattern of a project set for success. And it hits an intersection in just about every person’s Venn diagram of a project they’ve been on. I think that’s why the excuses aren’t working on the libs as much. Some of them actually have jobs and know management doublespeak.

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