Obamacare exchange suffers critical account failures, asks everyone to change passwords or register new accounts

Wednesday, October 09, 2013 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: Obamacare exchange, password reset, critical failures

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(NaturalNews) The online Obamacare exchange system has just performed a system-wide password reset. This is a sign that a critical failure has occurred behind the scenes: either a security breach has stolen passwords, or passwords have been lost. So now everyone is being required to create a new password, reports ARS Technica.

But that's not even the worst of it: some users are being told they have to create new accounts all over again. "Individuals whose logins never made it to the site's database will have to re-register using a different username, as their previously chosen names are now stuck in authentication limbo," continues ARS Technica.

It goes on to explain, "Ars learned that changes made to profiles already within the system may not be saved either -- a problem that is only indicated by a very non-descriptive error message."

To summarize:

• All passwords are being reset across Healthcare.gov

• Many users are being told they have to sign up again under a new account name, because the account name they tried to register is now "in limbo"

• Edits to personal profiles are not being saved and are instead producing error messages

Nearly half a billion dollars spent on Healthcare.gov

According to the IT dashboard which tracks government projects, Healthcare.gov has so far cost a combined total of over $500 million.

HHS seemed confident the project would be launched on time. That's not surprising, since people who push socialist government programs tend to be delusional thinkers, not realists. The massive failure of Healthcare.gov is yet more proof that the Obama administration is utterly incompetent when it comes to deploying a complex IT infrastructure.

Planners for this system had three years to create it, and even then they can't figure out how to make it work. Far beyond mere "glitches" as Obama claimed, Healthcare.gov seems to be overrun with critical design failures, programming flaws and security problems.

Where to now?

So far, the White House cannot name a single person who has successfully signed up for Obamacare. This article by Michael Snyder gives an excellent overview of the total failure of the Obamacare online exchange system.

As that story explains, the WSJ is currently reporting that only "hundreds" of people have been able to successfully enroll in health insurance through the Healthcare.gov website. Given that tens of millions of people have reportedly attempted to enroll, a success figure of only "hundreds" is a disaster. And even if "hundreds" is true, no one can seem to find who these people are.

As I predicted in a Natural News article published yesterday, Healthcare.gov does not appear to be a functioning database application at all and may, in fact, be nothing more than a front-end mockup of a working system. If true, this would mean the Healthcare.gov website is an elaborate hoax.

Even if it's not a hoax and the code actually exists to run the exchanges, it now appears that the underlying code is so broken that fixes may take YEARS to resolve, if ever.

The excuse that the site is experiencing "glitches" due to "high demand" simply doesn't hold water for very long. These are not glitches, these are core design failures. And the "high demand" excuse is laughable, because it's based on the idea that Healthcare.gov works fine as long as nobody uses it.

That's Big Goverment for ya. The biggest social program of all time now hinges on a collection of fragmented, broken computer code whose repair is probably impossible in anything under 2-3 years.

No incentive to make Obamacare actually work

Note, by contrast, that the private sector has already expertly solved these problems. Priceline.com, Orbitz.com, Travelocity.com and other reservation booking websites are driven by systems that are far more complex than Healthcare.gov. They made it work because they have a competitive incentive to do so.

But government has no real incentive to make anything work. After all, Obamacare is now a government-enforced monopoly. You don't have any choice to go without it! You are mandated under penalty of law to shop for insurance through this broken, failed system. So what do they care if it doesn't really work? There is no competition, and government contractors are notoriously bad with Information Technology projects. Almost none of them are completed on time or on budget.

I predict this is only the beginning of the IT failures we're going to see with Healthcare.gov. While some of the standalone state exchanges may be functioning, the primary federal website that powers the bulk enrollees is dead in the water.

Healthcare.gov has become an IT nightmare, and there's no solution in sight. If democrats can't figure out how to make this thing work by January, 2014, it's going to go down in history as one of the most colossal big government failures of all time. The failure of Healthcare.gov is yet one more reason why we should kill this disastrous program right now and return to a competitive marketplace where consumers are free to choose the coverage they want, without government interference.