Posted on October 14, 2013

Ezra Klein: So Far, Obamacare Website Is A "Big Failure"

EZRA KLEIN: The way this IT is going on is a disaster, I really don't think people should soft-pedal what a bad launch this has been. They've done a terrible job on this website. We're a couple weeks in now, and people can’t sign up, people have tried 20, 30, 40 times. It’s one thing for that to be true the first three or four days, it’s another thing for it to be true two or three weeks in.



The thing people are getting very concerned about is, what if it is not just the traffic, right? There's a front-end problem with the traffic, they designed the website where you had to go through the signup process before you can even browse. That is something we've begun to fix. That was the big traffic bottleneck, but behind that traffic bottleneck, there is not the worry that there are deeper, more systemic problems in the way different computer systems are interacting with each other. What is being put forward.



I'm not sure, nobody's sure, frankly, whether that will actually manifest, but I think it should be said: One of the Obama administration’s jobs, separate from all of the political stuff we talk about here, is to simply run things like this well, to run their signature legislative initiative well.To do government in a way that makes people confident and able to use it. On that, so far, this has been a big failure.