Some of the Best Case Studies Are Failures

Prediction: In a few years, Obamacare will be a biz school case study in what happens when a flawed product is rushed into production with insufficient planning and forethought, resulting in a flawed plan for the flawed product, and then the bad plan is badly executed.

From the beginning, there was little thought given the plan – in Nancy Pelosi’s immortal phrase, “We have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it.” Nothing could better sum up the way the government approached what even they must have realized was a huge undertaking.

And now the lack of planning, the whole idea of just blundering ahead, is having its inevitable result. Even sources closely allied with President Obama are forced to admit that the program is bombing, and bombing because it’s badly planned. Here’s the Washington Post, interviewing an IT specialist (emphasis added):

SK: The Obama administration has said that all these problems are happening because of overwhelming traffic. How good of an explanation is that?JB: That seems like not a very good excuse to me. In sites like these there’s a very standard approach to capacity planning. You start with some basic math. Like, in this case, you look at all the federal states and how many uninsured people they have. Out of those you think, maybe 10 percent would log in in the first day. But you model for the worst case, and that’s how you come up with your peak of how many people could try to do the same thing at the same time. 

Before you launch you run a lot of load testing with twice the load of the peak, so you can go through and remove glitches. I’m a very very big supporter of the health-care act, but I don’t buy the argument that the load was too unexpected.

Or here’s another pro-Obama source, Slate, describing a would-be insurance purchaser’s frustrations:

I have been in regular conversation with a person in Pennsylvania trying to get information about coverage under the Affordable Care Act. She is optimistic about the coverage she might get, but also wonders why her existing plan, which is far from perfect, is being canceled on Jan. 1. (The president said if you like your plan you will be able to keep it.) She started trying at 8 a.m. on Oct. 1, the minute the website went live, and has tried about 10 times over the week. Mostly she has been shut out entirely. Recently she has been able to at least enter in some of her information, but the site doesn't record the information correctly and doesn't let her change it.

So we are told that seven million people tried to sign up in the first few days (not really all that many, compared to traffic at many major private-sector sites), but strangely, we can’t get any numbers on how many have actually managed to buy insurance:

Jay Carney told reporters that the White House still doesn’t know the number of enrollees in the Obamacare marketplace exchanges after going live almost a week ago, and that they shouldn’t expect the information for about a month. 

“When it comes to enrollment data — I want to be clear about this — we will release data on regular monthly intervals,” Carney said, which is the frequency in which Massachusetts and Medicare Part D release information. “This is an aggregation process, and we’re not going to release data on an hourly, daily, or weekly basis.” 

When pressed by reporters about how the administration could know the number of online visitors to the websites but not the number of those who have enrolled, Carney said the administration used the former to explain [ … ] the Healthcare.gov’s many glitches in the wake of last week’s rollout.

You can be certain that if the numbers were good, Carney would be crowing about them. That he is covering up is a pretty good indicator that the number of enrollees is small.