White House says Obamacare website 'will work smoothly' after fixes

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/01/obamacare-healthcare-website-zients-barack-obama

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The White House tried to draw a line under its biggest domestic policy crisis on Sunday, declaring that two months of frantic computer upgrades had succeeded in largely fixing the online health insurance marketplace which is a key part of reforms implemented under the Affordable Care Act. The poorly performing federal website, healthcare.gov, has been at the centre of a continuing political uproar.

Jeff Zients, the troubleshooter appointed by President Barack Obama to rescue his flagship healthcare initiative by a self-imposed deadline of 30 November, said 50 software bugs on the healthcare.gov website were still being addressed late on Saturday night, as 30 November ticked into 1 December.

But a series of last-minute patches, combined with new hardware capacity that was only installed on Friday night, have been deemed sufficient to meet Obama's target of allowing "the vast majority" of customers to use healthcare.gov to enrol for health insurance.

"We believe we have met the goal of having a system that will work smoothly for the vast majority of users," said Zients. "On 1 December, we are night and day from where we were on 1 October."

The site will now be able to handle up to 50,000 simultaneous users and is stable at least 90% of the time, Zients claimed.

However, officials stressed that improvements would be still required during December. An electronic queuing system has been introduced, to temporarily turn away customers when demand exceeds peak capacity.

Spokeswoman Julie Bataille said an estimated 80% of those attempting to enrol for health insurance using healthcare.gov would now be able to complete the process, although not all of those who continue to struggle would do so as a result of website problems. Some would be handled through call centres instead.

Although far from the reliability standards of many commercial websites, the improved performance of healthcare.gov was underlined by officials who revealed for the first time on Sunday just how badly it had been broken in the weeks after its launch in October. At one stage, the system was stable less than 43% of the time and users had to wait eight seconds for an average page to load. More than 6% of the time, errors prevented pages from loading at all.

With 400 software bugs fixed and hardware capacity increased by up to four times, Zients claimed pages now loaded in under a second on average, with error rates of below 1%.

"The status of healthCare.gov in October was marked by an unacceptable user experience. Consumers were experiencing slow response times and frequent, inexplicable error messages. The website experienced frequent outages," said a damning report into the process.

The report added: "For some weeks in the month of October, the site was down an estimated 60% of the time. The assessment determined the root causes for these site flaws to be hundreds of software bugs, insufficient hardware and infrastructure. The system monitoring and response mechanisms were not sufficient for identifying issues or bugs or responding to them in realtime. Inadequate management oversight and coordination among technical teams prevented real-time decision making and efficient responses to address the issues with the site."

Zients said he had worked with primary contractor QSSI to bring "private sector speed and focus" to the management of the website, in order to address the problems

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