White House claim that Healthcare.gov will be working by Nov. 30th is a pipe dream

Tuesday, November 19, 2013 by: J. D. Heyes
Tags: Healthcare.gov, broken website, Obama administration

(NaturalNews) The White House has promised what IT specialists and computer programmers know to be complete BS - that the glitch-prone, hack-prone online federal Obamacare exchange, Healthcare.gov, is not going to be completely ready to go by the administration's promised Nov. 30 deadline.

Reports are already coming in that, despite putting an "A-team" of technicians on the case, the site has so many problems that are proving difficult to resolve that making the deadline just isn't going to happen.

As reported by The Washington Post:

Software problems with the federal online health insurance marketplace, especially in handling high volumes, are proving so stubborn that the system is unlikely to work fully by the end of the month as the White House has promised, according to an official with knowledge of the project.

The insurance exchange is balking when more than 20,000 to 30,000 people attempt to use it at the same time - about half its intended capacity, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal information. And CGI Federal, the main contractor that built the site, has succeeded in repairing only about six of every 10 of the defects it has addressed so far.

Do you believe them?

How a contractor that was supposedly paid millions to build a website failed so miserably is one thing, but expecting the same contractor to now fix it is a bit insane, wouldn't you say?

But nonetheless, the work continues. Only, you still may not be able to access the site even now if you want to; the Post reported that technicians working on Healthcare.gov say the only way for large numbers of Americans to enroll in health plans soon is to do so by using other means, so the website doesn't get overburdened again.

As noted by the Post:

This inside view of the halting nature of HealthCare.gov repairs is emerging as the insurance industry is working behind the scenes on contingency plans, in case the site continues to have problems. And it calls into question the repeated assurances by the White House and other top officials that the insurance exchange will work smoothly for the vast majority of Americans by Nov. 30. Speaking in Dallas a week ago, President Obama said that the "Web site is already better than it was at the beginning of October, and by the end of this month, we anticipate that it is going to be working the way it is supposed to, all right?"

This is from a president who lied repeatedly about Obamacare and claimed, incredibly, that he just had no clue the website wasn't going to operate as planned. Either Obama is incredibly aloof and is paying no attention at all to what's going on inside his administration, or he's lying about this as well. One thing is for certain: certain White House officials knew the site wasn't ready.

'We are working 24/7'

According to The New York Times, the Congressional Budget Office reported in June, before the Oct. 1 launch of the website, that it wasn't ready to launch, because it had not been adequately tested.

What is also known is that officials within the White House - and here, you've got to assume, don't you, that the president was involved on some level - told the website's chief architects and engineers that "failure was not an option," and that there would be no entertaining of suggestions to delay launching of the site or to roll it out in stages so that fixes could be better addressed.

Well, the rest is, as they say, history.

So the effort to "fix" this massive, broken system is underway.

And the administration sounds oh-so-confident.

"We are working 24/7 to make improvements so that by the end of the month the site is working smoothly for the vast majority of users. We are making progress, including fixes to reduce error rates and get the site moving faster," said Julie Bataille, director of communications at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services.

"The challenges we are addressing today," she said earlier, "are a snapshot of November 12, not November 30."

Sources:

http://www.washingtonpost.com

http://www.nytimes.com

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com