So recently the Affordable Healthcare Act went into effect and
people can now go to HealthCare.gov (link)
to create an account and find healthcare resources. Well, it didn’t go so well. The site has been plagued with problems,
everything from not being able to sign in to incorrect pricing for insurance
plans, and now it’s a daily headline about the company that created the site
being substandard (link),
or programmers complaining about unrealistic deadlines (link),
or whether or not the president knew the site was faulty before it went live (link).
Wow, seriously? A
website that doesn’t work as advertised?
When has that ever happened?
Ummm, like every day!
Back in
2000 I was part of a corporation that built and hosted websites, so I have a
little background in this stuff. I can
tell you that building an ecommerce site can be a very delicate thing,
especially with today’s programming technologies. There are a lot of web browsers that have to be
taken into consideration from Internet Explorer, FireFox, Chrome, and many
others (link)
which all have their own intricacies of handling code. Programming a website the size of
HealthCare.org is a really big project.
I looked at the source code for the site, and there are over 1,600 lines
of visible code just to make the very first page render on your screen.
But let’s get down to brass tacks – why are we having
congressional hearings about a website that doesn’t work correctly? Really, why?!
We’re literally paying expensive congressional mouth pieces to root out
the evil that caused this ginormous website to malfunction like it’s an anomaly
or something.
Think about the technologies you have, has it always worked
correctly? Isn’t the fact that iOS 7.0.3
was released so soon after iOS 7 hit the streets enough evidence to prove that
technologies sometimes don’t work correctly?
We’re not having congressional hearings about that, are we? Why is it so important to find someone to
blame with the HealthCare.org website?
Politics.
I’d love to see how much of our tax dollars are wasted every
year on politics, I think it would be staggering.
But I’m not going start on the politics of this issue or I’ll
be writing for the next week. There are
serious problems in this country that need the attention of our
government. Investigating a website
issue seems like a huge waste of time when over 14 million children in this
country have to rely on food banks for subsistence. (link)
Let’s get real about what our priorities should be, because I
guarantee there will be another website malfunction tomorrow.
“God, please open our
eyes to the priorities of your gospel: to feed the hungry, to house the
homeless, and to serve the underserved.
Amen.”
