News Analysis: What goes wrong with Obamacare website

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News Analysis: What goes wrong with Obamacare website

By Matthew Rusling (Xinhua) 14:49, November 12, 2013

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WASHINGTON, Nov. 11-- The Obamacare website, through which Americans sign up and get enrolled for affordable insurance plans, has seen glitches and technical errors since it was launched on Oct. 1, arousing questions about the function and credibility of the website.

Indeed, Healthcare.gov, a centerpiece of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, dubbed as Obamacare, has witnessed high-profile failures and almost out of service during the first two weeks, as consumers reported difficulties of signing up and getting enrolled.

Failing to make the website running normally, Obama on Thursday apologized to Americans who are losing their current health insurance plans.

"I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me," Obama said in an interview with NBC News.

The success of Obamacare hinges on getting enough young, healthy people on the exchange to pay the costs of older, sicker Americans, experts said.

What critics deride as government incompetence has embroiled the administration in controversy, with Republicans holding hearings in a bid to get to the bottom of the website failures and score political points in the process.

Some critics also worried that the website is not secure enough to protect the personal information that enrollees must provide online, leaving it easy prey for identity thieves.

Larry Kocot, visiting fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, told Xinhua that the implementation came too fast.

Since Obamacare's passage into law, many timelines have been compressed, he said, not allowing enough time for such a massive project to properly take shape.

"A project of this massive size...requires a lot of time and careful development," Kocot said of the project that has involved federal and state agencies and private sector contractors.

"The simple layman's explanation is that they just ran out of time in terms of the implementation of a very complex feat that they try to pull off," he said.

What goes on behind the website is actually more difficult, Kocot said, adding that he foresees more bumps in the road.

Others pointed out that the lead contractor, CGI Federal, was previously fired from a Canadian government project for poor performance.

And attention in recent weeks has turned to the firm's three-decade-long relationship with first lady Michelle Obama.

Toni Townes-Whitley, a senior vice president at CGI Federal, was a classmate of the first lady at Princeton University and gave 500 U.S. dollars in 2011 and 2012 to Obama's re-election campaign, and an additional 1,000 dollars to the Obama Victory Fund, although the company's political contributions were fairly even-handed, Fox News reported.

The Obama administration vowed to fix the broken website by the end of this month.

"We've got to work hard to make sure that they know we hear them and we are going to do everything we can to deal with folks who find themselves in a tough position as a consequence of this," Obama said.

A Gallup poll released Thursday found that only 18 percent of uninsured Americans -- the primary target population for the exchanges -- have so far attempted to visit an exchange website.

The percentage is slightly higher, 22 percent, among uninsured Americans who say they plan to get insurance through the exchanges.

The majority of uninsured Americans are unfamiliar with the exchanges and relatively few have tried to access them to date, even among those who say that they eventually will most likely get their insurance through an exchange website, Gallup found.