Obamacare Website: Shut UP, America!

jamin | October 24, 2013 | 0 Comments

Disclaimer: This is pretty condescending. And I don’t even care.

When I heard that Congress is actually holding hearings on the system failures of healthcare.gov (the Obamacare website for signing up for coverage), I almost lost it. Congressional. Hearings. On a failure of a government computer system? Really? Really.

Listen, I’ve worked for years on government systems and let me tell you, if America is going to freak out over every system not working that supports the government and its citizens, then nothing government-related would ever work. Are you kidding me? Do you people know nothing about system implementations?

Before you even try to part your lips to tell me that private companies could have done better, let me tell you a few things. Private companies create most of the systems that the government uses, and they all fail up to 100% at their rollout date. I’ve never seen one implemented that didn’t have a glitch or 50 on the first day. I once worked on a system that never actually should have seen the light of day until about a year later, but they went ahead with the rollout and the world almost came crashing down so badly that they had to revamp the entire contract and start over, essentially. And you think that government workers mess up all the time and don’t get fired? Lemme tale ya how it goes in private industry. You don’t always get fired. (Sometimes you can have a boss borne from Satan’s loins in Hell that gets promoted to a senior executive position even after they lost a dozen employees in a 3-month period due to being unable to work with the boss along with said boss losing a multi-million dollar contract and scores of employees due to client contract management simply not liking the boss and overpaying the boss for not delivering…THESE THINGS CAN HAPPEN…I’m just saying. White (male) ~~power~~ privilege!)

Any more defense of private companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, or other proprietary systems? Because if you haven’t noticed, for example, iOS 7 was released by Apple after many months in beta testing and by the following Friday they had iOS 7.01 ready to download. The week afterward iOS 7.0.2 was ready to download. I see that iOS 7.0.3 is ready now and I haven’t had iOS 7 for a month yet. The same thing happens with websites. Heck, do you know how many revisions I had to go through when I launched my retooled site here?

So, yeah, Healthcare.gov could have done way more extensive testing and probably have started earlier especially considering that it has to talk to so many legacy systems to get information from many states, but it’s not the end of the world. These things happen and I would really like it if we Americans would just have a seat on this one and stop acting like the world is ending. It would also be helpful to have the media actually talk to people who’ve done system implementations and have those people condescendingly explain to the “journalist” (muckraker) how system implementations actually go. Believe me, you don’t want to know how badly a missile guidance system’s software fails on a launch date.

Maybe more education is needed on how businesses operate. Maybe more data needs to be released about how computer systems fail more often than you’d like to admit, but we need to calm down. That definitely needs to happen. A Congressional hearing over a website failing is going too far and nothing more than political stunting by Republicans to save face after the government shutdown where they got their faces broken on the tiled Congressional floor. If we reacted this way to every government system failing (or even private systems), people would be afraid to do anything computer-related. Systems fail. Systems get fixed. It does not mean your idea was bad just because the computer wouldn’t turn on. Chill.

Is the Congressional hearing going too far? Does Obamacare cover blood pressure pills? Because y’all need them.