Deadline Day: Full Healthcare.Gov Conference Call/WH Transparency Issues

[Hamster Buddha]

Judgement Day for the Obamacare Website?

As many of you know, today is the date that Obama set for the site, in his words, to function smoothly for the “vast majority” of users. So where are we now with the website?

Deadline Day: Full Healthcare.Gov Final Status Report and Conference Call

Among the revelations in the report are a reduction in system response times, from 8 seconds in October to less than a second this past week, a decrease in the error rate from 6% to .75%, and an increase in system up time from 42% to 95.1%. Server capacity has been doubled, and firewall capacity has been quintupled. The report also boasts of over 400 bug fixes and software improvements, although Zeints told reporters that there is still much work to do. “The bottom line,” Zeints noted, “HealthCare.gov on Dec. 1st is night and day from where it was on Oct. 1st.”

Meanwhile, it seems there has been some issues on just how trustworthy (or at the least, verifiable) this conference call was:

NPR anchor Scott Simon opened the report by noting that the date at which point HealthCAre.Gov was supposed to be “fixed” opened with a rocky start after the site was closed overnight for last minute repairs.

“So, to be able to tell if the website is really fixed, is it as simple as logging in an trying to get health insurance?” Simon asked.

“No, it really isn’t,” Rovner replied. “It’s going to be very difficult for people outside to tell, and that’s what’s the really frustrating.”

“We do already know it’s working better than it was in October — that’s a pretty low bar to get over,” she continued. “The administration has all kinds of fancy metrics where it can tell if the error rates, how fast it takes pages to load, but people on the outside don’t have our own independent access to that information, so we’re going to have to take their word for how well it’s working.”

How Will We Know If HealthCare.gov Is Fixed?