Obamacare Ten Days Later
This is a follow up from my entry a week ago. I STILL HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO SIGN UP ON THE HEALTH EXCHANGE. Just imagine a company that is unable get people to sign up after ten days? Sign up, not follow-through with delivery of a product, but sign up! Here is CBS (not Fox) calling it nothing short of disastrous. Watch the piece because you will see a computer guru geek (who is pro Obamacare) rip the government. It’s embarrassing.
I have to actually defend the government on this one. While a website/server crashed with high demand is certainly unacceptable, as long as companies that actual specialize in this sort of thing have these same issues, I can’t fault the government.
Rockstar games released Grand Theft Auto 5 online play October 1st (game released september 17); players of the game are JUST STARTING to be able to play online. For most players, online isn’t available yet and Rockstar has a two weeks of sales lead time to correctly account for maximum demand. Diablo III (another highly anticipated video game by Blizzard) took more than two weeks to get the online game up for all players. While Rockstar doesn’t do AS much with online gaming, Blizzard is better known for World of Warcraft. Server set up for online gaming is a defining feature of Blizzard entertainment and the company has been specializing in large volume online players for more than 10 YEARS. They had pre-order numbers to give an idea of numbers to deal with. And even with years of experience and good predictions they COULDN’T KEEP THEIR SERVERS UP. They had the SAME PROBLEM that the ACA websites are having.
ACA websites had no solid predictors of numbers (you can’t pre-sale insurance) and this is the first time any health insurance company has ever had to deal with a nationwide rollout. Yes it is bad for business and yes the guy who predicted demand should be sweating his job. But right now, the ACA website is in the same place as private sector businesses (that had greater technical expertise and experience) so I can’t fault them for it. If the best of private sector company takes 2-3 weeks to get with it, then I can’t blame the government for not getting its act together in the same amount of time.
Don’t get me wrong, if Nov. 1 rolls about and the ACA website is down, my voice will join the chorus of bitching and incompetence as loud as any. But if the private sector can’t do it, I sure as hell am not going to put it on the government.
Here is the thing. NO ONE KNOWS IF ANYONE HAS EVEN GOT INSURANCE YET. Your points are well taken, but let’s just see how they do in a few weeks. You gave them 3.
Hate to whisper the obvious, but – psssst – NO one has been forced to buy Grand Theft Auto, nor report said purchase to the IRS. The production and rollout of video games is not subsidized by taxpayers. So no one is at legal risk from their own &$(#¥ government if they opt out of gaming.
What a marvelous tribute to state-sponsored compassion. Anyone supporting the government’s involvement in daily, routine health care is responsible for this hilarious failure. This was all to be expected or, as my role model Sterling Archer would observe: “Oh yeah, do you want ants? ‘Cause that’s how you get ants!”
Sterling Archer is YOUR role model? He’s MY role model. And you can’t have him because he was my role model first.
And I have the black turtlenecks to prove it.
Oh, crap – now where’s my gun?
Ha ha.
I am no fan of the ACA, which is a POS, cobbled together, ineffective mess of a giveaway to insurance corporations as far as I’m concerned (and I’d favor single payer if it was done properly, and no, I’m not holding my breath for that one), but, even so, I am gobsmacked by the sheer incompetence demonstrated by the Administration so far, only ten days into the program.
I was listening yesterday to the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC (NY Public Radio) yesterday; he’s a very level-headed intellectual talk show host who has deputized a number of listeners to sign up for the ACA and report back. He had three of them on, none of whom had been able to sign up. One got pretty far into the process when the website asked him whether it had the name of his *DOG* correct – he answered “None of the Above” because he doesn’t have a dog, and the site told him his response was invalid and threw him off.
Go to WNYC.org and listen to it yourself.
It’s that bad.