The National political press corps just spent an entire month reporting on lots of bad news for Republicans. You know how that worries them. So it’s not surprising they seem about to spend the next month reporting on bad news for the President vis-a-vis Obamacare as a disaster in progress. Because, you know, balance!
Glitches in a less than brilliantly designed website equals shutting down the government and setting out to cause default on the national debt in the hopes that bringing the economy to the brink of collapse will show them.
Ok. The website is a disaster. Heads should roll. But on Monday Facebook got "glitchy" and my students couldn’t post the links to their blog posts on our Digital Commoners page before their deadline. Meanwhile, I spent the morning visiting three commercial websites looking for information it took me three minutes to actually read but an hour and a half to find following links that were less than helpful (when they existed. There’s almost nothing less useful than the FAQ page at any website.) I needed to visit a fourth website but I forgot my password and when I requested a new one I got a message promising an email was on the way to help me through the process. The email arrived twelve hours later. Just for a laugh, I checked our new insurance company's website to see if it had been updated to show they've expanded their coverage area to our neck of the woods and our family doctor is now in their network. It hadn't. And this was a relatively good and carefree day on the internet.
Again. The website’s a disaster and there’s no excuse for it. But every day even some of the best designed websites get overwhelmed. Downloads don’t download or open after they do. Orders get lost. Payments double post or don't post at all. Identities get stolen. Viruses get spread. Maintenance is being done when you need to get in there right now! No one seems to have anticipated your particular question or problem. There’s no easy way to contact a live human being. The site is just plain ugly. The layout’s confusing. Links are broken. Information's out of date. Instructions are unclear. Instructions are wrong. Instructions are gibberish! Servers crash. Pages hang. Browsers freeze. This stuff happens all the time and we live with it because we know through experience whatever the problem we encounter it will get fixed or we’ll figure out how to work around it.
As digby points out, despite the problems with the website, people who need health insurance will persevere because they need health insurance. The bobblehead assumption seems to be that people will get stymied and throw up their hands, saying, “My kids need to see a doctor but screw them, this is too frustrating.”
Whatever the situation or issue, the bobbleheads think all Americans are as soft and spoiled as they are.
Ok, once more with feeling. The website’s a disaster that shouldn’t have happened. But it did and now it’s getting fixed. And that’s pretty much that. Although it calls into question the competency of the people supervising the rollout, it doesn’t predict the future of Obamacare.
We’re not looking at a “train wreck.”
We’re looking at a skyscraper under construction.
Calling Obamacare a disaster or a failure already is like rubbernecking at a major construction site during the first week of construction, noticing that the rubble from what was demolished to make way for the new building is still being cleared away, looking down into the hole where the pilings have just been set, watching the delivery trucks backing up at the gates, listening to the architects and the contractors arguing over what needs to be done first today, hearing horns honking as the traffic backs up in the one lane that hasn’t been closed to make way for the cement mixers, bulldozers, dump trucks, and cranes, eavesdropping on angry neighbors complaining about the noise and dust and confusion and workers on a break grousing that somebody ordered the wrong gauge of wire or not enough pipes or didn’t hire enough guys from their local and a foreman coming over to holler about falling behind schedule, taking in all this mess and din and declaring that this skyscraper will never get built.
Or…if it does, it will surely collapse in short order.
If it doesn’t collapse, no one will want to rent any of the apartments or lease any of the office space.
Even if every office and apartment gets occupied, people won’t like the décor and there’ll always be lines at the elevators.
If they do like it and don’t mind the lines, it won’t matter, because in fifty or so years the building will have outlived its usefulness and be torn down and replaced by something else, so there’s no point in finishing it. Might as well stop construction and let the site sit empty for the next half a century and anybody who needed the place to live or the office space or anything the shops down at street level would have offered can just go find what they need somewhere else, don’t ask us where or how, or…
…they can just go suff.
People who can't get through on the website need to use the toll-free phone number. Someone needs to tell "hollow-eyed granny starver" (don't you just love Charlie Pierce) Paul Ryan that the website may be a mess BUT ALTERNATIVES WERE PROVIDED. (Yes, I was shouting. Ryan has a propensity to selective hearing.)
Posted by: JD | Wednesday, October 23, 2013 at 12:54 PM
As digby points out, despite the problems with the website, people who need health insurance will persevere because they need health insurance.
And that's precisely the problem. Uninsured people with serious medical conditions will persist in signing up. But the longer this disaster plays out, the fewer young, healthy people with few healthcare needs will put up with it before walking away. And Obamacare is perversely reliant on the participation of these people (who have the lowest incentives to to participate, that grow lower every day the site is non-functional).
If too many of these young, healthy people drop out of the risk pool because the IT system that promised to make insurance easy simply doesn't work, the worse the actuarial picture for those who do enroll gets. Premiums begin to increase, which causes even more healthy people to drop out when they conclude that insurance isn't a good deal anymore. This is the dreaded adverse selection death spiral.
This is an unmitigated disaster that has to be fixed, and fixed far sooner than most people realize. If the fix doesn't come quickly (or Obamacare doesn't get delayed), it has the potential to be catastrophic for the entire insurance market.
More here: Is Obamacare in a Death Spiral?" by Megan McArdle.
Posted by: Steve French | Wednesday, October 23, 2013 at 10:25 PM
Steve, is the McArdle link supposed to be funny? Honestly, by her standards, the designers can just blame gastritis or say they didn't have calculators, explain that they come from families of academics who were intellectually quite intimidating and that should be excuse enough for anyone.
Posted by: Josh | Thursday, October 24, 2013 at 12:59 PM
Ummm...anybody here remember the rollout of the original Windows VISTA? The "beta" version? The one that wouldn't work with half the licensed apps? The one that everybody HATED..?
OK. The one that was created by Microsoft? Immense IT company? Sorta does digital media for a living? Big operating system creator, multibillion-dollar corporation?
The one that was supposed to be the disastrous clusterfuck of ALL TIME EVAH!!??
Yeah. THAT one.
The fact that a complex platform created by 55 separate contractors (OK, I'll give somebody a power-wedgie for that - who could imagine that anything could go wrong with that plan..?) is having teething problems is irritating, but WORSE THAN THE HOLOCAUST!!!???
No.
Sweetbabyjesus, people. Get a hold of yourselves.
Posted by: fdchief218 | Friday, October 25, 2013 at 08:45 PM
fdchief218,
This. Thank you. While I appreciate the critiques and concerns of the younger numbers crowd (and thank god there *is* a younger "numbers crowd," we need more statistical analysis not less in US policy-making), deciding that a data set of several weeks forecasts the apocalypse doesn't actually bear up to, well, statistical analysis. Not only does it need to be compared and contrasted to the life cycles of changing modalities in different kinds of social media (Lance's example about Facebook getting "glitchy" and the public response to it is more germane than a blind terror that hip young early-adopters will turn up their noses permanently) but we should, genuinely, consider what rolling out Social Security in the digital age would've looked like, when we go back and examine all it went through in the "teething" stages. And that's not a "back in my day," remark, it's an opportunity to do some serious counterfactual consideration about two data sets.
Frankly, it's a good thing for the longer term that we now get to confront two important things about policy implementation in this field. First the thundering fustercluck of having so many different contractors is something that needs to get fixed. This is a case where fair practices have become reductio ad absurdum. Second, there are so very, very many poor Americans desperate for health insurance that, while there will be some balance of risk pools from young healthy people, this will allow Teh Mightee Markit to observe that, just like with old folks, there's not really a profitable way for them to manage costs and reduce them via better preventive care for the armies of our disenfranchised. Maybe, just maybe, it will turn out that having, oh, I don't know, some kind of publicly-managed risk pool where everyone chips in a bit in taxes so that the insurance companies don't have to carry that lead weight around with them, could work. I think they tried something like that with retirees. Medi-something. Could be wrong. Also, with a smaller pool of healthy folk looking for private policies, we might be able to winnow down the number and efficiency of private insurers to the ones who are actually good at what they do, rather than those who just soak up premiums, deny benefits, and play the tables on Wall Street. Of course that kind of rank mid-to-long-term optimism probably just means they upped my meds again ....
Posted by: El Jefe | Saturday, October 26, 2013 at 01:49 PM