Website Failures - Diagnosis of Obamacare & Common App

(10/21/2013) Obamacare website (HealthCare.gov) has been full of glitches since Day 1 of its launch. The Republican party was so busy wrestling on government shutdown and totally ignore a great opportunity to nail Obama government. Now the shutdown is over, media and Obama critics start paying attention about how wrong HealthCare.gov is. There is a good analysis on NBCNews today.

I like this comment: “Buying a health plan is a lot more complicated than buying a flight," says Brandon Cruz, president of GoHealth, a private health insurance marketplace. “When you’re buying a health plan, you need to know all the doctors in the network, what you deductible will be, what your co-insurance will be. And the terminology is so foreign.”

What is Obama's temporary solution to this failure? "“So you'll find information about how to talk to a specialist who can help you apply over the phone or to receive a downloadable application you can fill out yourself and mail in,” Obama said."

This is a good lesson for complex website launch.

(10/31/2013) Are Obamacare website's glitches contagious? The "Common App" (a platform that allows high school students to send out their applications to multiple schools at one time) just had a huge problem for their users and high school students cannot submit their applications successfully. Common App is not as new as Obamacare registration website. From the reply of the company's executive, it is "technological glitches from some new technology updates" on their platforms. Many universities are forced to extend their application since there are as many as 800,000 applicants impacted. It is not promising that this problem can be solved before the peak time of application. I bet the enrollment offices in many colleges won't be happy this year because their admission process is forced to be delayed.