Ben Everard: Obamacare's failure to launch

By BEN EVERARD / For the Register

Ben Everard: Obamacare's failure to launch

Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio, stands next to a printed version of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, during a news conference on Capitol Hill, May 16, in Washington, D.C.


"Consider that just a couple of weeks ago, Apple rolled out a new mobile operating system, and within days, they found a glitch, so they fixed it," said President Barack Obama on Oct. 1 during a press conference. "I don't remember anybody suggesting Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads."

Once it was clear that the launch of Obamacare was fraught with more than just simple design flaws, President Barack Obama asked the public to give the government additional time, comparing the Affordable Care Act's launch to Apple's tech issues.

The president's point is a fair one. However, the comparison to modeling Obamacare's rollout to that of a large corporation does not stop there.

Companies such as Apple have little margin for error when rolling out new applications to the public. Even minor flaws receive intense scrutiny and can ultimately be fatal to a new product launch or even the company itself. Given the incredible importance of successful rollouts, major corporations diligently and meticulously spend time on research, development and testing prior to introducing the new design – a process that often takes years.

Consider the recent comments from Aetna's CEO Mark Bertolini, given during a CNBC interview. Aetna is one of the country's major health insurance providers and has a front row seat to the design and implementation of our new health care system.

In describing the Obamacare website, Bertolini noted that he was initially concerned that the launch would be difficult. He noted being “pretty nervous” in part because the government kept “missing deadlines.”

“When you implement a project of this size, the first thing you do is unit testing,” he said. “Then you do application testing and then you do integrated testing. Then you do scalability testing and then you do user testing. That plan is usually a lot longer than some of the application development itself. [With the Obamacare site] that's happening on the fly… all of it's been on the fly. We didn't get code drops until probably the last month before the system went live.”

The administration has had several years to ensure that the launch would be smooth. Instead, it has been nothing short of a disaster. Some states have yet to register a single enrollee. Delaware celebrated its first successful enrollee on Oct. 16 – over two weeks after the system went live.

Testing of the system was clearly inadequate, and it appears the design itself may have fatal flaws. The multiple steps necessary to successfully implement a massive new program – as outlined by Aetna CEO Bertolini, appear to have been given minor consideration by those in the administration tasked with execution of the law.

This in part explains the soured introduction of the country's new health care system. The problems are not simply the result of massive volume overrunning servers, the administration's first narrative – rather, they are representative of systematic defects.

The shortcomings of the implementation are indicative of a broader issue of whether the government can effectively and competently manage health care as posited. If this failed launch is a signal of things to come, Americans should indeed be wary.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a notoriously lengthy statute, is accompanied by approximately 10,000 pages of regulations in the Federal Register. It is incredibly complex and it is a safe assumption there is not one person in the country that understands all of the regulations in their entirety. Thus, the problems with the law and its application are unlikely to become simpler over time.

The president promised to revolutionize health care by providing affordable options on easily accessible exchanges. Instead, the launch has the potential to derail the program before it is even given the chance to succeed.

Opponents of the law have attempted to find a way to repeal it from the beginning. It appears it may be in danger of falling on its own sword.

Ben Everard is an attorney and producer based in Los Angeles.



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