The $634 million 'performance issue'

The $634 million 'performance issue'

With the Obamacare website crashing daily since it went online Oct. 1, it's a wonder anyone at all has been able to sign up to then be able to “shop” for government health care.

revenge-nerds

REVENGE OF THE NERDS, 1984

“The befuddled beast that is Healthcare.gov has shutdown, crapped out, stalled, and mis-loaded so consistently that its track record for failure is challenged only by Congress,” Andrew Couts with Digital Trends  proclaimed this week.

Suffering from “performance issues,” Healthcare.gov has been a flop so far. Uninsured Americans haven't been able to purchase healthcare coverage online, as promised by the government.

Digital Trends reported the federal government expected only 50,000 people per day to log on to the site.

The federal government spent $634 million on the Obamacare website for only 50,000 people per day?

Even Facebook didn't have to spend $634 million to build a website. Facebook handles 1.11 billion people using the site each month, more than 600 million each day, and 751 million using Facebook from a mobile device each month.

Facebook operated for a full six years before surpassing the $600 million mark in June 2010, Digital Trends said.

I hope you're not in a hurry…

“'In a hurry?,' reads a message on the website’s failed login page,” Digital Trends said. “You might be able to apply faster at our Marketplace call center. Call 1-800-318-2596 to talk with one of our trained representatives about applying over the phone.”

“The reason for this nationwide headache apparently stems from poorly written code, which buckled under the heavy influx of traffic that its engineers and administrators should have seen coming,” Digital Trends explained.

Apparently a couple of 26-year old guys living in their parents' basement were hired to write the code, one might imagine, based on the colossal failure. Picture them sitting in front of giant computer screens, wearing only boxer shorts, dingy tube socks and knitted beanies, surrounded by a sea empty food containers and soda bottles.

Or don't. That's a hideous image.

I'd rather picture Gilbert and Lewis from Revenge of the Nerds — at least those two could get the job done.

Digital Trends said the problem stems from the contractors selected to create the system. “The failure of Healthcare.gov isn’t because the people in our government are inept mouth-breathers who regard the work as a meaningless burden, but because the factors that play into which companies receive government contracts, a process called 'procurement,' are fundamentally broken.”

And when things inevitably go wrong with government contractors, the government simply throws more money at the same people who caused the problem, to fix the problem.

Even though he said he supports Obamacare, Couts added, “What I cannot stand is a nation that has vast technological resources in its citizenry spending $600 million of our collective money to slap together a product that, thus far, has only managed to waste people’s precious minutes.”

…”Precious minutes wasted?” What the government has so cavalierly wasted is precious taxpayers' dollars.

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Tags assigned to this article:
DemocratsgovernmentKaty GrimesObamacarewaste

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