ObamaCare glitches

The ObamaCare exchanges have been riddled with glitches. I spent three hours last week trying to look at what’s available and couldn’t even create an account. It was not the “fast, completely scalable and secure” experience I was promised by the chief technology officer at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The administration has claimed these problems are related...

The ObamaCare exchanges have been riddled with glitches. I spent three hours last week trying to look at what’s available and couldn’t even create an account. It was not the “fast, completely scalable and secure” experience I was promised by the chief technology officer at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The administration has claimed these problems are related to heavy traffic, which is supposed to prove how successful ObamaCare is. It’s also supposed to prove how popular ObamaCare is, despite the fact that themajority of Americans continue to oppose the law. And, of course, many of the glitches plaguing the system are caused by problems in the source code itself, which can’t honestly be blamed on traffic. A lot of developers, including those who support ObamaCare, have noted many issues with the code, calling the site a “complete software technology disaster.”

Given how many problems I was having with site, I headed over to the developer’s page to try and get more information about the site’s source code. While there, something caught my eye. Near the bottom of the page, the federal government has this graphic:

GitHub is an online platform where developers can share code. And this graphic is supposed to show HealthCare.gov’s activity on GitHub in the weeks and months leading up to the site’s recent launch. That’s quite a bit of activity being shown in the graphic.

But anyone who has used GitHub before probably recognizes that graphic. That’s because it’s a default graphic that shows up before you click through to a project.

If you overlay the default graphic over the one at HealthCare.gov, it’s plain the federal government isn’t really showing us the site’s development history.

And when you look at HealthCare.gov’s actual GitHub history, this is what you see:

These numbers are a lot smaller than the ones prominently displayed on the Developer’s tab atHealthCare.gov. But one has to wonder why HHS is bothering to waste time faking something as trivial as this.

In hindsight, that time probably would have been better spent actually testing the site for glitches. But I guess the good news for ObamaCare is that if people can’t actually use the website, they won’t know how much their premiums are skyrocketing.