It’s time to stop complaining about the Obamacare website

Back in June of 2003, Star Wars nerds like me were champing at the bit to get to play a new Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game called Star Wars Galaxies.  It was one of the biggest games of the year and millions of  Star Wars fans had been waiting for over three years for it to be released.

Release day was June 26, 2003 – I still remember it to this day.  I was so excited to get the game I actually took a day off work to play it.

Did I actually get to play it?  No.  Why?  The servers were ready to handle the load of players, but the billing and registration systems couldn’t handle the stress caused by so many people buying and trying to log in at the same time, so they crashed.  And crashed.  And crashed.  It was frustrating beyond belief, especially to nerds like me who took the day off to play and were instead sitting at a loading screen for hours at a time.

The launch went down as one of the worst in gaming history.  Fast forward to 2013.   Ten years later, Electronics Arts (the largest gaming company in the world) subsidiary Maxis released its hyped Sim City reboot, the first new Sim City game in a decade.  It was, like Star Wars Galaxies, a cloud based game, requiring connections to a server in order to play.  And, just like Star Wars Galaxies, its launch was plagued with network outages, an inability to connect to the server and many players (including, once again, me) were stuck unable to play a game they’d bought and had been highly anticipating.

Even ten years later, the smartest and most cutting edge software designers were still having the same problems that the folks at SWG had on launch day – it’s almost impossible to predict all the things that will go wrong when you have millions of people trying to do the same thing at the same time on the internet – even when you anticipate them.

That’s why I’m having a hard time getting worked up about the Obamacare website woes.  Yes, it’s an easy thing to attack the President for, and for those of us who don’t like the concept of Obamacare, the fact that their vaunted website doesn’t work is a lovely bit of schadenfreude.  But is it worth all of the sturm and drang over?  Do we really need Congressional hearings about why a website sucks?

No.  Because this happens to even the best programmers.  What we really need to deal with is the fact that the health care and health insurance sectors of our economy are broken, and Obamacare does nothing to fix them.

The reality is relatively simple – if you wanted Obamacare, you’ll deal with a broken website, which will be fixed sooner or later.  If you didn’t want it, you’ll never like it regardless of whether the website is great or weather it sucks.  Spending a lot of time hammering IT guys over a faulty site doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

I could have demanded my money back from the SWG folks when I couldn’t play the first day, but I didn’t.  I just wanted to play.  And while EA did allow all of us who had a problem with Sim City to get a free game on them, I didn’t really want that either – I just wanted to play.  Eventually the problems were fixed and Brisc Rubal was running around killing Stormtroopers and the fine people of Brianopolis were building roads and zoning for heavy industry.  But here, fixing the website isn’t going to provide folks with what they want – affordable health care (and affordable health insurance).

Those of us who don’t like Obamacare don’t really care if the website works or not – we just want a health care system that works and doesn’t bankrupt the country, force people to buy something they don’t want to buy, and enrich the insurance companies using the IRS as their collection agency.

That’s what we need to be arguing about and highlighting, not technical glitches on a website.  Fortunately, that’s what we’ve been doing for a while now, even before Ted Cruz started his quixotic talk-a-thons.

There is no point spending a lot of time and effort bashing the administration because of website problems because fixing the website won’t fix Obamacare.  And that’s what really needs fixing.

Сейчас уже никто не берёт классический кредит, приходя в отделение банка. Это уже в далёком прошлом. Одним из главных достижений прогресса является возможность получать кредиты онлайн, что очень удобно и практично, а также выгодно кредиторам, так как теперь они могут ссудить деньги даже тем, у кого рядом нет филиала их организации, но есть интернет. http://credit-n.ru/zaymyi.html - это один из сайтов, где заёмщики могут заполнить заявку на получение кредита или микрозайма онлайн. Посетите его и оцените удобство взаимодействия с банками и мфо через сеть.