Saturday Reuters reported that IT experts it contacted saw serious problems in the design of the exchange website launched last week by HHS:
One possible cause of the problems is that
hitting “apply” on HealthCare.gov causes 92 separate files, plug-ins and
other mammoth swarms of data to stream between the user’s computer and
the servers powering the government website, said Matthew Hancock, an
independent expert in website design…“They set up the website in such a way that too many requests to the server arrived at the same time,” Hancock said.
The Wall Street Journal has a story which also critiques the design of the exchange:
Information technology experts who examined the healthcare.gov website at the request of The Wall Street Journal said the site appeared to be built on a sloppy software foundation. Such a hastily constructed website may not have been able to withstand the online demand last week, they said.
[…]
So far, many tens of thousands of people had started the application
process but the number of those who were able to create accounts and
shop for coverage is likely in the low thousands, according to people
with knowledge of the situation and estimates by insurance-industry
advisers.
So it’s possible that after a full week we do not have even 5,000 successful sign-ups? No wonder the administration doesn’t want to use this as a metric for success.
Via Hot Air‘s Erika Johnsen, here’s Treasury Secretary Jack Lew on Fox News Sunday repeatedly refusing to say what the number of sign-ups is at present.