The official website designed to help users get in on the federal health exchange, Healthcare.gov, isn’t exactly performing up to snuff. With many users unable to get in, and those who managed to get in unsure if the information provided managed to get through or is even safe once it got in, there are a lot of questions and plenty of problems. New reports, however, suggest that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that runs the site has called in some powerful help to get the site back on its feet and handling the host of visitors from no less than Verizon.
The reports came in from a source who requested anonymity, as the announcement wasn’t yet official, but if the reports bear out, Verizon’s Enterprise Solutions division is set to come in and step up Healthcare.gov’s performance, which has recently proven to be packed with fodder for everyone from conservative groups to late-night comedians. Further reports from the HHS offices suggest that Verizon—if it is ultimately called in—may not be alone on the list, either, as plans were noted to go beyond government contractors to reach out to civilian companies to help Healthcare.gov’s own woes. HHS, however, wasn’t responding to requests for further comment.
Some, however, suggest that the odds of fixing the problem, even with Verizon’s possible help, aren’t sure. California’s chief information officer, Clark Kelso—who served under both Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger—notes that the odds of a fix are about even, saying, “They’ve got a short window here to try to fix things. Simply throwing a lot of new programmers at something like this does not guarantee success.”
As for what will need fixing, there seems to be several issues connected with the site, similar to issues faced by California in getting its own health exchange site up and running. Underestimating the load involved—the sheer number of users on the site at any one time—and issues of code between insurers and the site itself. The federal site, meanwhile, seems to be having issues compiling information from the individual states and the insurers, according to Kelso, and this is generating a lot of the problem. Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale, a company that deals in cloud computing issues, referred to the Healthcare.gov site’s issues as a “success disaster,” in which a site gets too many users to easily cope.
Verizon certainly has plenty of options for corporate sites to put to use, so it stands to reason that Verizon would do, just as well getting a government site back on its feet. The Healthcare.gov affair has proven something of a black eye for the government so far, but if it can get the site back up and running in rapid fashion, it may be able to minimize the size of the problem represented and say it was simply a temporary problem that was quickly fixed.
The response to the issues seen so far will likely determine the long-term success of both the site and the largely Democrat-driven initiative that brought it into being. The faster a fix can emerge, the better, at least for those involved in its creation and continued operation.
