Why would this be surprising. It's a project with huge scope, with dependencies that they can't fully control (IRS, Social Security etc), with likely changing requirements, and a tight deadline.
It's not like they could have released in beta and iterated, or waited until it was perfect. It's the nature of the beast - if the major annoyances don't get fixed in a reasonable [1] amount of time, then it's worth writing reams over.
Sarah Hall Ingram, the director of the IRS's Affordable Care Act office, told a House panel Wednesday that the IRS hasn't experienced similar problems.
"The portion of the responsibilities the IRS is in charge of is going fine," Hall Ingram said.
Well, they could be telling the truth. E.g. "(If and) When we get a query, we respond to it in our N second allowed window" (as I recall the total time allowed is 7 seconds).
I'm pretty sure some decent fraction of the entities Healthcare.gov queries behind the scenes are doing their job.
Well, most of the time. One thing that occurred to me is that if certain actions require a lot of backend queries to different sources, multiplying the probabilities each could outright fail or blow the window could result in an overall flaky system.
Which doesn't directly explain why the offline part of the registration system is failing so often.
Comments
Why would this be surprising. It's a project with huge scope, with dependencies that they can't fully control (IRS, Social Security etc), with likely changing requirements, and a tight deadline.
It's not like they could have released in beta and iterated, or waited until it was perfect. It's the nature of the beast - if the major annoyances don't get fixed in a reasonable [1] amount of time, then it's worth writing reams over.
1. Undefined.
The IRS interface is working fine [1]:
Sarah Hall Ingram, the director of the IRS's Affordable Care Act office, told a House panel Wednesday that the IRS hasn't experienced similar problems.
"The portion of the responsibilities the IRS is in charge of is going fine," Hall Ingram said.
[1] http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implement...
According to the IRS.
Well, they could be telling the truth. E.g. "(If and) When we get a query, we respond to it in our N second allowed window" (as I recall the total time allowed is 7 seconds).
I'm pretty sure some decent fraction of the entities Healthcare.gov queries behind the scenes are doing their job.
Well, most of the time. One thing that occurred to me is that if certain actions require a lot of backend queries to different sources, multiplying the probabilities each could outright fail or blow the window could result in an overall flaky system.
Which doesn't directly explain why the offline part of the registration system is failing so often.