I don't think you are seeing the whole big picture here. While it is true that it setting up a website is not rocket science..... (I can say that with authority since that is what I do for a living), there is a great deal more that has to happen for the ObamaCare website to function. To put it simply, the website has to access multiple databases, some government databases designed God-only-knows-when and with what technology and what program language. Then it has to parlay the data accumulated from them into a formula of sorts that then calculates a particular pricing for an applicant. Then it has to put that together with the input gathered from the applicant's choices and send all that to the data bases of the appropriate insurance company.
Now imagine if you had to pour through outdated file cabinets with files all written in a language you do not read or speak, interpret them, calculate a price based on hopefully the right interpretation plus some information the applicant typed in that may or may not be accurate or complete, then compile it all and forward it to an insurance company whose language you also don't understand.And on top of all that you had little or no training for the job, and what training you did have was confusingly complicated rules and contradicting itself on totally impracticable and changing daily on the whims of a President who makes exceptions for political cronies!
What I am saying is, there is so much more to this disaster than just simply building a website. The databases and the information they contain must be up-to-date and compatible,the "formula" for calculating must be workable and realistic, the rules can't change daily on the whims of politicians.......... and all the above is just not there.
I shutter to think what will happen when this same crumbling, archaic system with it's many errors and maybes, is accessed when some long-nailed, uneducated government worker (think TSA people), is tasked with okaying or denying a medical procedure my doctor needs to do to keep me alive one day soon. When the error message appears on the screen, will the doctor be told to give me as aspirin and tell me try again in a month or so?
how come Progressive can give you a bid in about 30 seconds?
My only question is, do they really even care if any of that works? Do they want life-or-death situations such as you describe, with patients literally dying to even get registered for a healthcare plan?
All that is true. I also suspect (know!) that know-nothing bureaucrats defined (cobbled) the original specs and continued to change/modify them as the project progressed. the so-called “glitches” are far more serious than that term denotes. Also, as an old programming pro, I find the term “computer problems” to be completely false. That implies hardware malfunctions and shifts the blame from the erroneous human generated code to an inanimate object. What we see with this mess is software specified by bureaucrats, code written by a foreign (Canadian) company of questionable repute,with specs modified continuously by know-nothings.