I had promised myself I wouldn’t post anything about Obamacare simply because evaluating healthcare policy is outside my wheelhouse. That said, the software portion of it is something I find myself interested in. Particularly the aspects related to the design.
With that, obviously the rollout has been less impressive than expected. This article says the President blames high traffic:
President Barack Obama is encouraging consumers not to give up enrolling for insurance under the new health care law.
He says sign-up problems have been caused by a website overwhelmed by high traffic. The president says officials are working “around the clock” to reduce waiting times.
Also, Ezra Klein is saying similar things and is not pleased. He does offer a silver lining regarding the overwhelmed servers:
The good news for Obamacare is that lots of people want to sign up. Lots and lots of people. Many more, in fact, than anyone expected. The bad news is that the Obama administration’s online insurance marketplace — which serves 34 states — can’t handle the success.
“The amount of demand is really driving the issues,” a senior administration official told me. “But we’re adding capacity every hour.”
Megan McArdle is a little more circumspect on the high demand theory.
I don’t know anything about the software or design of the system. Never the less, I have several questions related to the high demand problem. First, what kind of load was the system designed to handle? Do we know anything about the designers and their experience with such systems? I’ve seen the claim that the government is adding “capacity by the hour.” The government is in shutdown, so who is doing that? I assume they are considered “essential personnel”? How are they adding capacity by the hour? Are they throwing more servers at it? Better connectivity? In McArdle’s articles, she hints that the servers are getting millions of visitors. For a sense of scale, Google gets roughly 5 million search requests per day. It was claimed there are 47 million uninsured in the US, what percentage of those were estimated to enroll? What kind of equipment is being used and what’s the server platform?
Instapundit has a link worth reading. It also gives rise to other questions. Like, how capable is this system of withstanding various known cyber attacks like denial of service attacks? How tested is the system against garbage input? My understanding is a fair amount of personal information is requested during the signup. How secure is all that information?