Not Glitchy, Just Bad

According to the Washington Post, the Obamacare healthcare.gov website is not suffering from mere glitches – it’s just a bad website. “Problems with the federal government’s new healthcare Web site have attracted legions of armchair analysts who speak of its problems with ‘virtualization’ and ‘load testing.’ Yet increasingly, they are saying the root cause is not simply a matter of flawed computer code but rather the government’s habit of buying outdated, costly and buggy technology.”

In other words, this is not a problem that will be fixed by a few techies. This problem is endemic to having the inefficient and ineffective government run the healthcare system. The government has reportedly spent some $634 million to build its healthcare.gov website, more than it cost to build Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram – and it works worse than all of them, by a long shot.

“The US government spends more than $80 billion a year for information-technology services, yet the resulting systems typically take years to build and often are cumbersome when they launch,” says the Post. The Post even contrasts healthcare.gov with the Obama campaign website: “The result has been particularly stark when compared with the slick, powerful computer systems built for Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, which in 2008 harnessed the emerging power of social networking and in 2012 relied on aggressive data-mining efforts to identify and turn out voters.”

There is no quick fix for this problem, because there is no way for the market to demand a fix, and because the government has never created a program that became significantly more efficient over time. There is no accountability, because Obamacare, as President Obama is so fond of pointing out, is the law of the land. And unless Obamacare is scrapped, this mess will become ever worse.

Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).