One day, our great-great-great grandchildren will laugh at our Dark-Ages digital technology — most likely while cruising around on jet packs and buying Google Glasses out of vending machines. They’ll probably speak of the stalled https://www.healthcare.gov/ website the same way we speak of rotary telephones and dial-up Internet.
Because, let’s be honest: It’s ridiculous. Since its launch, healthcare.gov has experienced technical difficulties that have prevented Americans from signing up for the program that — aside from excessive and undue drone attacks and Michelle’s arms/bangs/anti-obesity campaign — has come to define Barack Obama’s presidency.
Yesterday, according to Reuters, Obama held a meeting at the White House Rose Garden with consumers, small business owners and pharmacists who have been affected by the new law to attempt damage control.
A White House official said Obama found the glitches “unacceptable” and plans to address the issue head-on. Reuters also reported the president and his team would bring in tech experts from both inside and outside the government to repair problems with the website — but it’s unclear how long that will take.
In the meantime, White House administration officials are poised to travel the country and encourage people to sign up for health care. But if the website problems aren’t resolved in time, the American people who support the Affordable Care Act may lose confidence in its ability to succeed — and opponents of Obamacare will have ammunition to criticize it further.
The whole ordeal calls into question the federal government’s decision to rely on CGI Federal, a subsidiary of a Canadian firm called CGI Group, to orchestrate the creation of healthcare.gov. More details about the Canadian company have surfaced in the wake of Obamacare’s technical woes, and they’re not pretty.
“Experience in similar types of projects is very important in getting federal contracts,” according to the Washington Post. “CGI had done work in the health care arena, and not all of it good: Its performance on Ontario, Canada’s health-care medical registry for diabetes sufferers was so poor that officials ditched the $46.2 million contract after three years of missed deadlines.”
CGI isn’t wholly responsible, though, the Post reported. A number of issues may have contributed to the rocky rollout: Not enough funding, hastily written code and the entire federal procurement apparatus, which makes it harder for smaller IT companies to bid on federal government jobs.
On the surface, the healthcare.gov problems may seem like a simple technical hiccup. This is not the case, though: Many internal, back-end issues are hindering the success of the program. It’s a shame, too — we want Obamacare to work, we really do. But if the technical issues aren’t resolved swiftly, even supporters of health care will have a hard time justifying a system that’s so broken.
A version of this editorial ran on page 6 on 10/22/2013 under the headline "Thanks, Obama: Glitches stall health care rollout"
