Some real stuff that is bugging me about the ACA

[Professor]

Being a government contractor, I sympathized with the companies. I watched their testimony. They were given a set of instructions for the site. They started building the site. Then change orders rolled in. They were being asked to make changes up until 2 days before it went live. They requested clarifications on certain items that they never received an answer on.

As with any situation, when you are hired to hit a target, and the target keeps moving, it's going to be very hard to hit it.

Let's think about probabilities, here. These companies were chosen because they had done this before, successfully. They have experience doing it. How often has HHS done this? Never. If you are going to assign blame for failure, who is most likely to be wrong - the people who have done it, or the noobs?

[Professor]

Real world example:

We recently rolled out a statewide program that included a website and call center to take applications. On the very first day, we fielded 2,669 phone calls, had 33,951 pageviews (6,150 unique visitors) on the website, and had 2,707 applications completed. This was just in one, single state.

If we take the population of this state and extrapolate for what the healthcare should have been able to accomplish on the first day with a nationwide rollout, we see that they should have been able to handle, on the first day:

- 95,000 phone calls
- 1,212,000 pageviews
- 219,500 unique site visitors
- 96,600 completed applications

Obviously, whatever the reason, they fell FAR short.

[Dylan]