(Via Jim Geraghty) Why did it take them until September 28th to notice?
[On Sept. 28, Cover Oregon’s team] had gathered on a Saturday for final testing of the state’s health insurance exchange. More than a website, it was a gateway to a new era of better, more affordable, more democratic health care.
But their high hopes turned to shock and alarm when the website didn’t work. It crashed, it flashed repeated error messages, it couldn’t process the most routine insurance enrollment scenario.
[snip]
“Shut it down,” said Rocky King, Cover Oregon’s executive director. “Let’s not waste anybody else’s time here.”
Only, that’s precisely what they did:
…Agents, however, won’t have full use of the site on Tuesday as was planned, they learned Monday. Instead, they’ll be asked to not fully enroll anyone. The problem is the site is still not providing accurate information on whether enrollees qualify for government assistance such as tax credits or Healthy Kids. Until that is fixed, agents are being asked to enter and save client information, but not check on eligibility for assistance.
Rocky King, executive director of Cover Oregon said he hopes that the problem will be fixed by the coming weekend, but he doesn’t want people being improperly denied help. “I will not go out with something until I am satisfied that this is correct,” he said.
It’s now mid-December, and the site’s still broken. Mind you, the first article makes it clear that Cover Oregon did know that Oracle (to pick just one example) was drastically messing up the website’s development. The problem is, of course, that Oracle and its CEO Larry Ellison were at the time royal favorites in Barack Obama’s court*, which meant that they had no real checks on their behavior. Which meant that they shrugged off the work. How bad could things get?
[pause]
Well, time to break out the song again.
And the heck of it all? These are the salad days for Cover Oregon. Just wait until its victims get a load of their new rates.
Moe Lane
*That this is not a killing insult to any self-respecting member of the Democratic party tells you just how bad this administration actually is. Andrew Jackson must be spinning in his grave.
“Oregon’s technology team is engaged in a massive “de-scoping,” jettisoning many of the whistles and bells included in the state’s original ambitious plan.”
And there you have it. They tried to build a gold-plated piece of wonder with a classic Waterfail plan, staffed by people who had an interest in stretching things out.
“Karthikeya Kala was alarmed by the fact that Oracle was essentially writing its own project specifications – and poorly at that”
This is known as a “disengaged customer”. Betcha the people chosen to run the project for the state were chosen on the basis of connections and Party Doctrine rather than competence.
We spent over $5 billion on these crappy web sites and all we got was embarrassing propaganda. And you think that’s bad? Imagine how it’s gonna be for those who actually are able to sign up and have to live under Obamacare.