Are healthcare.gov problems the result of chimpanzees randomly typing code? I’m a software developer and have experience here. Their problems are just over the top.
Telling people to send in written applications if they can’t get online doesn’t work because a government agent has to enter them in the same broken system.
The final document produced by the process is a 834, which sends data to insurers. For a while, no one knew if the 834s entered by individuals was what was going out to insurers. Hello? It’s the same data. Getting it garbled takes true incompetence, or maybe it’s those damned typing chimps again.
The application process skips important parts of the application for some for no apparent reason. How helpful.
Spouses were getting identified as “unmarried.”
Here’s my favorite.
In mid-October, the tool to estimate potential premiums was misreading ages, recording each person as having an age range, rather than a definite age. That was affecting the tool and its results, potentially for almost everyone.
Age is a field in a database. How that can be screwed up so it turns into a date range is simply stupefying. I mean, you’d really have to work hard to mangle things that badly.
And no, I don’t think it’s a conspiracy.