The Affordable Health Care Act website at HealthCare.gov has been the talk of the town, with endless chatter of frustration, anger and downright shock at the failure of an operating website for the public to take advantage of the new health care act. One in five Americans who wanted to sign up for heath insurance found it nearly impossible. The website was simply not functioning, freezing or completely malfunctioning since inception in October.
As of Friday, though, CNN reports that “the front end of HealthCare.gov is working better, but many problems identified in the days after its launch persist, according to a team of Web engineers.”
The problem lies in governmental websites being outdated, as explained by Obama in his “Fumbled” speech. If you’ve ever tried to navigate Social Security or any other government site, you’d agree. And that is the biggest hurdle with HealthCare.gov, out dated applications, badly written code, incorrect testing codes and more. The website that was supposed to support this brand new health care system, designed to help millions of people get health insurance, has failed miserably.
There were alternatives though, such as calling in to get insurance quotes, however with the website down, the wait time was extremely long, many reporting 3-5 hours to complete this daunting task, and some even longer.
Jeff Zients, the management expert brought in by the White House to oversee the site’s repair, repeated the administration’s assurances that “most users” will be able to navigate from start to enrollment by the end of the month.
The point is that ObamaCare is a good program and will enable many uninsured Americans to have health insurance at an affordable cost. Not only that, people with preexisting conditions cannot be turned away. It is going to help so many millions of people that perhaps it is worth the wait?
Or could this just be blown out of proportion so that certain “other party” representatives can claim an Obama fail? After all, they hated the idea from the get go. But, remember, having a website fail is not a life or death situation, and by the looks of things, the opposition just seems to have finally grabbed onto something they can turn into a national case.
The White House representatives stated that it is functioning now, and within a month it should be fully operational. That should be good enough for Americans who have been paying high health insurance rates and have been turned down for preexisting conditions. Its a blessing in disguise, but may take a little patience.
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