Obamacare Glitch: Symptom of Bad IT

Obamacare hit another snag last week when it was revealed that form 1095-A, for some 800,000 taxpayers who could claim a health-care subsidy, was incorrect. Some who already filed their 2014 taxes will have to refile, while others who have not filed yet will have to delay filing their return until the error is corrected. The delay will impact some taxpayers who had been counting on a refund, possibly tying up money that’s due to them for weeks.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest downplayed the latest glitch as “only” impacting 800,000 people, those who qualify for a health-care subsidy.

Only? True, that number represents a low percentage of tax filers, but a mistake isn’t a small one when it can affect the same number of people as the population of San Francisco. Let’s also not forget that the people receiving the subsidy are likely people who couldn’t afford to purchase health insurance in the first place, and only went ahead and got insurance because of the promised subsidy. Without the subsidy, many of them will be cutting back on food and other essential consumer items. Let’s remember that the only reason Obamacare was enacted in the first place was to help “only” the minority of people in the country that didn’t have health insurance.

Instead of forcing these filers to either refile or wait until the IRS gets the form right — and who knows when that will be? — the IRS should calculate an estimated subsidy for those eligible and the U.S. Treasury should mail them a check. If the amount turns out to be more than these filers deserved, the difference can be mailed back to the Treasury. At least this way any cash-strapped filers will have the money they need to cover their living expenses.

But perhaps more glaring than this callousness on the part of the administration to the plight of people not receiving their refund in time, is the lack of accountability for yet another computer glitch. Imagine if JP Morgan Chase had to notify 800,000 of its customers that they can’t take out money from their account for several weeks due to a computer error. JP Morgan Chase would fire every last person in the IT department responsible for the outrage. Or what would be the fallout if Amazon made a mistake with hundreds of thousands of its customers? Here, however, there is no apology to the taxpayers, no attempt to find out who or what system was responsible for this latest embarrassment.

This latest headache is only another in the long line of so-called glitches that have plagued the rollout of Obamacare, in what’s supposed to be one of the cornerstones of the administration’s policies. Recall the fiasco when healthcare.gov was first rolled out: web pages became unresponsive and browsers crashed. After spending time meticulously entering information into online forms, users would find that all the data that had been input was inexplicably lost. Only two weeks ago, users again were experiencing issues with the income verification portion of the process.

Of course, the Obamacare website has had a lot of traffic, but hundreds of online retailers routinely handle that kind of volume daily — and they have been smoothly doing so for more than a decade. The approach to processing a high volume of users has been to have redundant servers and databases to balance the load. Standard development of web applications requires test frameworks to mimic the anticipated load on the system, and if the test system begins to show strain under usage, more servers are added to handle the load. That this approach wasn’t initially taken reveals a lack of understanding on the part of the Department of Health and Human Services on how to structure distributed systems.

Load balancing is one dimension of modern computer systems. Another important dimension is the ability to handle complex logic, which requires extensive testing of different permutations that could be input into the system. The instruction booklet for form 1095-A runs to 15 pages — a challenging amount of logic testing. The form itself is two pages. That filers were sent the wrong data on the form points to inadequate testing of a complex system.

The concern over all these gaffes should cover a broader area than just the incompetence of the federal government to roll out a health-care system. It should call into question just how well run and equipped are the IT departments of other agencies. What we have been seeing lately doesn’t give us much confidence that our federal agencies are up to the job.

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