Website woes threaten Obama’s signature legacy

To the supporters and aides of Barack Obama, it must have looked like the hard part was over. The US President had battled health care industry lobbyists, overcome the fierce resistance of the Republican opposition and shepherded his Affordable Care Act (ACA) through the minefield of a government shutdown and threatened debt default. The only thing left to do was to flip the switches and open the government’s expensively built healthcare website to the public, then sit back and watch as millions of Americans rushed to sign up for often-subsidised medical coverage.

Maybe they should have taken better heed of Murphy’s Law, the folksy adage that anything that can go wrong will – especially in a massively complicated undertaking encompassed a mind-boggling 500 million lines of code, in which any single bug can bring the whole system crashing down. The result was that visitors to the website were greeted with a stream of error messages such as “Try again later,” and were unable to logon, verify their identity, update their profile or see the details of the health plans on offer for them.

To be sure, the website was a significant technical challenge. It needed to verify and secure applicant data, and integrate it with information from other federal computer networks in Social Security Administration, Internal Revenue Service, Veterans Administration and the Office of Personnel Management. White House spokesman Jay Carney on Wednesday said that some “hiccups and glitches” were expected: “We did not expect or anticipate the scale of the problems.” As government critics point out, cutting-edge Silicon Valley companies routinely manage to build computer systems that smoothly handle the information of millions of users.

The government was limited to using only approved contractors to set up the healthcare.gov website, and could not enlist Facebook’s or Google’s armies of engineers. David Gerwitz, influential government tech columnist for ZDNet, wrote that political constraints of Obamacare meant that the site was almost destined to fail. When tech companies build a site, they start by rolling it out in beta or trial mode to just a few users, and then proceed by debugging and improving the tech in small increments until they are sure the site is ready.

“Healthcare.gov rolled out to the entire United States population on one day. All at once. Of course it blew up,” Gerwitz noted. “It is a very bad practice to roll out your entire system to the full breadth of a huge user base. It pretty much stands no chance of succeeding.”

Most of the criticism so far had been targeted at Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who has gamely tried to defend her boss by insisting that Obama has not been told of the problems before launch. The exchanges needed five years of construction and one year of testing, and instead had only “two years (of construction) and almost no testing,” she told The Wall Street Journal.

In a White House press conference, Obama promised a “tech surge” that would fix the problems. “We are doing everything we can possibly do to get the website working faster,” he said. “Nobody is madder than me that the website isn’t working as well as it should, which means it’s gonna get fixed.”

But many experts predict that the problems are so deep that it may be best to scrap the 600-million-dollar web project and start over. “We don’t even know where all of the problems lie, so how can we solve them?” Security Compass chief executive Nish Bhalla asked CNN. “You can’t fix what you can’t identify.”

The glitches look sure to taint Obama’s legacy programme And maybe even the whole leftwing idea of an activist government working for the good of its citizens, says the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza. The so-called Obamacare “is the most important liberal project in decades,” he tweeted. “If it fails, it is a complete disaster for liberalism.