The animosity of health care has not let down, we are still
currently facing major issues. The most recent issue that is making headlines
is the failure of the United States health care exchange website. The failure
has made the already disgruntled public even more disgruntled. The failure of
healthcare.gov is frustrating; many people were left to be confused and angry
because the site was not fully functioning meaning they could not even apply
for health care. Eventually so many people were upset that this brought the
attention of national media and this even prompted Barack Obama to have a
televised speech about the failure of the website.
Now the question many are asking is...who
was in charge and how can we fix this? This took a little research and maybe a
half hour watching CNN to help me understand what was at stake here. I learned
that Kathleen Sebilius the Health and Human Services Secretary was basically
the person who was overseeing the production of healthcare.gov. This is going
to cost the American people a cost of $118 million on the website and $56
million for other IT to help keep the website running. This information was
made public during a congressional meeting that questioned why such issues were
occurring healthcare.gov.
The severity of this issue has lead to an
apology by Sebilius and Vice President Joe Biden. Sebelius stated that she had
made a "mistake" when she advised President Obama that healthcare.gov
was ready to go. Her argument was that in the midst of this entire unknown we
are trying to put together it would inevitably lead to issues. In regards, to
the health care website there are ONLY issues. This could issue could have been
prevented to make matters worse. According to CNN.com, the main contractor of
the healthcare.gov project, CGI Federal warned that the website was not ready
to go online about a month before its opening on October 1st. CGI warned of
security issues and stated that they did not have sufficient ability to fully
test the site. Major parts of the website were completed but the site crashed
on an end to end test according to a CNN report.
All in all, there a multitude of issues
that are present but only one thing continues to remain and that is that we
still do not have a website to rely on. It seems that it will be difficult to process all this information as we run out of time to sign up for health care. If you go on the healthcare.gov website it states that we will have to enroll by the deadline of March 31, 2014. In addition, there are security problems which leave
the public's most sensitive information at risk. President Obama pledges to fix
this issue as soon as possible and reports on theverge.com state that engineers from Google and
Red Hat have been assigned to work on these issues.
Below I have linked the articles that provide more in depth information about healthcare.gov issues.
Warning to Obama about Website issues
Congressional Meeting with Sebilius
Red Hat and Google to help speed up healthcare.gov recovery
Healthcare.gov
I think this issue reveals a lot about how our government is ran just like a private company. These types of mistakes happen all of the time with mid-size and large corporations. This is a classic case of someone wanting to hit a deadline, despite being told that there are flaws and unresolved issues, and just getting something out the door. Many people just want to get a project launched and hope to smooth out the bumps afterward. I am still confused to whether the issues are a result of too many people trying to use the website and crashing certain functions or if it was just poorly designed. I can't understand how the latter would happen since the government had a large enough budget to make this thing work from the beginning.
ReplyDeleteAdditionally, I read an article on a business news website which discussed how CEOs don't understand the workings of technology. Obama is essentially the CEO of the country and people don't realize that he had a team managing his campaign technology, from the websites to the social media platforms. He was probably told this healthcare.gov website was good enough to go and really didn't have the background tech knowledge to know the significance of these flaws. Again, government works the same as a private company....in my opinion.
I agree with you. They do work like any other company. CEO's tend to work more with policies and meetings. I know this from experience, I am an Administrative Assistant for an Executive Director and I have helped her many times with technology. I think the best thing to do for Obama at least would be to admit his team's mistakes to the American people. I saw on CNN how Chris Christie was asked what would be the best thing for Obama to do. And I think he is right,
ReplyDeleteThe healthcare system continues to be a major task for the current administration to tackle, was for the past and most likely will be for the future administrations. What is needed is a solution with enough force behind it so it survives the change in the oval office. Obama's solution might have had potential for success, but with the website failure described in this blog, it might shaken public's confidence; which is needed for a successful reform.
ReplyDelete