#Obamacare: site code needs a "minor rewrite"

**Posted by Phineas

"Obamacare has arrived" — “Obamacare has arrived”

Somehow, I think untangling a warehouse full of tangled fishing line would be easier. According to that noted radical conservative, Tea Party rag The New York Times, there’s no way the Obamacare web site’s problems will be fixed by November 1st:

From the sluggish websites to garbled enrollment information, the flaws require the extensive rewriting of code: “One specialist said that as many as five million lines of software code may need to be rewritten before the Web site runs properly,” the Times reports — that’s out of a total of approximately 500 million lines of code, according to another expert.

And these are just the problems they know about. It’s a sure bet that there are other giant bugs lurking in the code, waiting to be revealed by the fixes — or created by them. (1)

Fixing the problems may not be as simple as rewriting millions of lines of code; don’t forget, a great deal of the problem lies with the political decision to make people register for the site, create an account, and be verified in order to determine their subsidy eligibility before they’re allowed to browse the available policies. This was done to “protect” people from seeing the true, skyrocketing costs of coverage, so they wouldn’t run screaming at the start. (But, they’re screaming now…) Fixing the code probably requires undoing that, but good luck getting the White House and HHS to sign off on it.

I hope the programmers have plenty of coffee on hand.

via JWF

Footnote:
(1) Ever done a major plumbing renovation for a house? Installing new pipe to fix one leak seems to almost always reveals weaknesses elsewhere.

(Crossposted at Public Secrets)

Great White Rat says:

October 21, 2013 at 10:33 pm

There’s an easy fix. Assign the people who wrote the NSA system that snoops in your email (and the Mexican and French presidents’ emails) to revise the ObamaCare site. It’ll be up and running perfectly in days, if not hours.

And from then on, your computer will be watching you, instead of the other way around.

Neo says:

October 21, 2013 at 10:41 pm

There’s a not-too-old Russian joke:

It is the time of Stalin, he is traveling in a train and it becomes stuck in the snow. Stalin says, “fire all the engineers and replace them with the proletariat.” The trains gets moving again.

Time passes.

It is the time of Khrushchev, he is traveling in a train and it becomes stuck in the snow. Khrushchev says, “bring back the engineers. .. they knew what they were doing.” The trains gets moving again.

It is the time of Brezhnev, he is traveling in a train and it becomes stuck in the snow. Brezhnev says, “pull down the shades and pretend we are moving.”

… next, Obama will be saying we should pull down the shades and pretend …

Drew the Infidel says:

October 22, 2013 at 5:56 am

The re-write and testing afterward are time-consuming affairs are not the equivalent of “cramming” for a college mid-term exam, yet the signup deadline remains fixed. Go figure.

This is simply another in Obhammud’s long unbroken string of failures.