USA Today: Obama's Crowning Achievement Needs a 'Total Overhaul'

Well, clearly, USA Today should just shut up already. So should the tech experts who keep pointing out how awful Obamacare’s multi-million dollar web site is.

“It is a core problem in the sense of it’s fundamental to this thing actually working, but it’s not necessarily a problem that the people who wrote HealthCare.gov can get to,” Engates said. “Even if they had a perfect system, it still won’t work.”

Recent changes have made the exchanges easier to use, but they still require clearing the computer’s cache several times, stopping a pop-up blocker, talking to people via Web chat who suggest waiting until the server is not busy, opening links in new windows and clicking on every available possibility on a page in the hopes of not receiving an error message. With those changes, it took one hour to navigate the HealthCare.gov enrollment process Wednesday.

Those steps shouldn’t be necessary, experts said.

People accustomed to surfing Amazon.com and ordering whatever they want in a matter of seconds will find Healthcare.gov to be a frustrating experience. And that’s assuming they can create an account and get the correct information on their form, and that the information they submit isn’t intercepted by fraudsters.

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Engates said HHS has been opaque about the problems, and the tech industry doesn’t know the extent of the issues. “There’s no secrets leaking out,” he said. “I’m sure everyone’s looking for something to change the direction of the conversation, but it’s just not there.”

“I think it’s a data problem,” Kim said. “It always comes down to that.”

And if that’s the case, the problems are beyond “rocky,” he said. Instead, it would require a “fundamental re-architecture.” In the meantime, “I think they’re just trying to shore up as quickly as possible. They don’t have time to start from scratch.”

“If I was them, and I’m just conjecturing, I would probably come up with some manual way of saying, ‘Only people with the last name starting with ‘A’ can sign up today,” he said.

But come March 31, when the first enrollment period ends, the “shore up” period may become a “re-architecting” period, Kim said.

Read the whole thing. And then forget you read it and sing praises to His Magnificence King Barry the Wise, or you’re one of those terrible people who listen to bloggers and professional activists who profit from conflict. You don’t want to be one of those people, do you?