Surprise: Healthcare.gov Has a Brand-New Failure

One of Healthcare.gov's "innovations" was telling people to get off the website and come back later.

You know, like all big websites do. Amazon famously tells you "come back later" all the time. Google notoriously says "we can't handle your search at this time, please wait in line to conduct your search."

By the way, before getting to the new news, let's examine this ridiculous claim made more and more frequently by Obamacare defenders -- that Healthcare.gov is having problems "just like any other website." See, for example, Rahm Emmanuel's brother, Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel (second video at bottom of post):

"I think it's good enough progress. Clearly, just like Google and FaceBook and all the internet sites are constantly tweaking their sites, constantly improving them, this one still has a ways to go. But it is, certainly, working reasonably well."

Wait, what? Google and FaceBook and all the rest of the internet sites are routinely non-functional? The spin here is so obvious it's condescending to point it out, as I'm sure you caught it, but putting it on the record:

Rahm's Bro is attempting to liken Healthcare.gov's problems -- which is a complete botch, a non-working system, and a system which furthermore has been crippled by its designers for both political reasons (don't want public to have too much sticker shock) and, well, other political reasons (we said we'd have this ready to go, and it's not ready to go, so we'll just take all the difficult things out of the website, like the payment system) -- with Google's and FaceBook's tweaks and improvements to actually functioning websites.

He's actually claiming that FaceBook's occasional aesthetic changes and new features are just like Healthcare.gov's complete failure to work at all. That if FaceBook offers you a new version of the Poke Button, that's just like a complete and total failure of a website to do anything except generate error messages and identity theft.

So: "Just like FaceBook," I guess, when Healthcare.gov can't handle traffic, it asks you to come back later to update your profile. It puts you in a queue, so that you don't have to "wait in line" again.

You know, wait in line, just like FaceBook. I'm always waiting in line to post an update to FaceBook. Why, it took me eight hours of waiting and fighting with the FaceBook system to add "This sandwich is tasty" to my FaceBook Wall.

But, get this, the queuing system isn't working, says a Bloomberg health care writer:

Maybe the next "tweak" and "improvement" Healthcare.gov offers is a secondary queuing system so that you can wait in line in order to wait in another line.

You know, just like Google, FaceBook, Amazon. All those other sites that are always giving people error messages and completely failing to do the tasks they're supposed to do.

posted by Ace at 03:06 PM

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