Why is the government having such a damn hard time with their Healthcare.gov website?

Because government has to award contracts to the lowest bidder.

I don’t know whether this web designer was the lowest bidder” or not, but if they were, that didn’t necessarily have to be an impediment to success. But according to what I’ve read, this particular company had a history non-successes, and if that’s true, the vetting process was poor. But there are other reasons including the site’s under-the-hood complexity, insufficient testing, unrealistic expectations due to over-promises by the government, and, as is the case with any huge government initiative, too many “fingers in the pie” and probably some of them not overly committed to success.

But the website is the NOT “Obamacare” program—it’s only one portal to signing up. There are other ways to do that, notably by phone and in person.

I’m guessing the firm doing the development bears a lion’s share of responsibility. I’t entirely likely that gathering information was a problem, but if the government sources were slow to provide the needed data or unresponsive, it was the developer’s responsibility to raise the roof till they got the attention of someone sufficiently engaged in seeing the project was successful, and having sufficient authority to make that happen, that the job could be done on time.

Complex as Amazon and Ebay are, they come nowhere near the complexity of this job. The Massachusetts State Health Connector site worked really well, but it took serious time to get it working after rollout. And it’s now messed up again as its developers try to modify it to fit the requirements of the Affordable Care Act. That’s just one state site, a small state at that, and one where all but 3% of the residents are already signed up for healthcare insurance. And it’s a state whose site has been up and running since 2006! So it’s not surprising that getting the national site working smoothly is going to take time.

@elbanditoroso it’s a bit more than that. It’s all the background checks that companies have to go through to be able to get gov contracts. So only really big companies(often more expensive and less skilled than some start ups) are able to bid for the jobs.

Part of it is due to Denial-Of-Service attacks distributed openly by government haters to like-minded jerkoffs.
Although close investigations suggest these really could not have caused a Lot of the problem, just some.

Another aspect is that the states were supposed to set up their own exchanges.
By all reports, the states that have set up their own exchanges are doing well with their sites.
Almost all of the states that did not are run by governors from the fuck-you-we-got-ours party, and they’d do anything to make life harder for Obama whether or not it’s a disservice to their citizens.
The federal government is stuck setting up a federal exchange to breech the gap where the state have abandoned their people. And it has to accommodate an order of magnitude more people than it should have had to.

Remember when Diablo 3 and Sim City 5 were launched? And those were made by industry juggernaughts, and they still crumbled under the initial load. Launch problems like that are to be expected, and people who point and laugh at Obama for this, have no idea what they are talking about.

Or the real question, why do people think the government is capable of running our healthcare? Immigration is a mess, infrastructure is failing, the Post Office is broke…

Lets give them more responsibility!

I told you so.

@DWW25921
”why do people think the government is capable of running our healthcare”
Because it DOES work in every other country with public healthcare?

@ragingloli I know. It will never work here because of the republocrats. The 2 parties have been fighting against the will of the people for almost as long as we’ve had a country. They are useless, corrupt windbags that are owned by the puppeteers of big business. What else can we expect but failure and corruption? I’ve been saying this for years and I got a new example… Thanks Obama!

I guess I’m the only one that used Amazon.com in its early days.

Because it’s nothing more than Obamacare propaganda.

That doesn’t make any sense @SecondHandStoke. Propaganda is designed to manipulate people into believing something. The glitchiness of the website has/had the opposite effect.

^The question asks about the sites issues.

So my issue is how shall I put it, a broad one.

I guess.

Healthcare.gov functions well as a warning.

As to what to expect when it’s time for actual treatment.

OK.