When an Obama initiative is failing so badly that even Jon Stewart feels compelled to mercilessly mock it for nearly ten minutes straight, you know it must be bad. Here’s a small selection of the most embarrassing failures of the Obamacare online health exchanges so far.
1) The site crashed just minutes after it went live on October 1.
2) The site apparently wasn’t tested until the week before the launch date.
3) According to its source code, the HealthCare.gov home page called up 62 separate JavaScript files, creating an even greater load burden.
4) In the days leading up to the launch, the site still couldn’t verify what subsidies people were eligible to receive.
5) People who were lucky enough to access the site and create an account couldn’t verify their e-mail addresses.
6) The script that handled e-mail verification failure couldn’t even settle on a single color scheme.
7) Users whose e-mail addresses were finally verified couldn’t log in with their newly created accounts.
8) The site sent incorrect or corrupted information to the insurance companies providing the plans.
9) The site apparently contains over 500 million lines of code.
10) Consumer Reports magazine issued running commentary on how terrible the site was.
11) The code was littered with spelling errors.
12) The one guy the media celebrated for enrolling in a health plan via the exchange was an OFA worker who didn’t actually enroll in a health plan.
13) And after the launch, health insurance companies sent out plan cancellation notices to hundreds of thousands of people.