Detailed Analysis of the Affordable Care Act Website Failure Report

This report provides an in-depth analysis of the failures of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) website, also known as Healthcare.gov. It explores the technical and design issues that led to its initial struggles. The report examines the incorrect design model, specifically the lack of agile development, and the absence of proper testing before launch. It details the IT problems, including poor coding practices and improper usage of data tables, which resulted in security vulnerabilities and data errors. The report also highlights the impact of last-minute changes and the sheer volume of coding involved. The analysis draws on multiple sources, including reports and articles, to provide a comprehensive overview of the factors contributing to the website's failure, offering insights into the complexities of large-scale government IT projects.

Running head: AFFORDABLE CARE ACT WEBSITE
AFFORDABLE CARE ACT WEBSITE
Name of Student
Name of University
Author’s Note

Introduction
Around 20 million individuals had experience the failure of the Affordable Care Act
website. The previous president of the particular association of Software Testing, Ben Simo
had discovered something that is beyond the black screen or the cumbersome login. He had
found numerous evidences on the subpar coding that had been carried out in the website of
Affordable Care Act (Scherer, 2013). In the middle of October, he had been to the
Healthcare.gov for helping a specific family member to get an insurance, there he had
discovered that his website had not progressed much. On investigation he had discovered that
the actual cause of the failure is that a specific part of Affordable Care Act website had
resulted in creating a huge number of cookie tracking data which had resulted in exceeding
the capacity of the website (Anthopoulos, Reddick & Giannakidou, 2016). This denied to
accept any sort of information relevant to login. This had proved that the development team
was not much effective in performing their jobs.
Discussion
Issues in designing and implementing the code
The mistakes that were made when designing and implementing code for the
Affordable Care Act website are mentioned below
Incorrect design model: agile development had been in demand and is also well
known and popular among industries for eliminating common errors that are made by other
systems. In this case, the contractor did not make use of the agile model for the purpose of
designing, he did not use it for building the most vital characteristics and hence get them to
work along with adding more amount of functions in less number of sprints (Real,
McDermott & Bertot, 2015). Besides this, they had utilized the old and outdated waterfall
model of built as much as you can, after that they had tested the outcome. Agile reflects the

fact that testing is carried out right from the initial stage and not after few stages have been
carried out. The vice president of marketing had mentioned that the Affordable Care Act
website was not designed accordingly (Tynan, 2016). He further mentioned that if the
designing is not done properly, it proves to be the initial point for the failure to occur.
Lack of testing: before the implementation is carried out, the website did not carry out
any sort of digital testing of the website. The initial testing was carried out few days before
the website had to be launched (French, Homer & Gumus, 2016). Due to this when the
simulation had almost reached around some hundred users, the website crashed.
Changes carried out in the last minute: the very first mistake that had resulted in the
failure of the website included the fact that the government did not start working on the
website till the year after which the law had passed. Work must have been started underway
the very following day. Then the government had come into the matter along with
introducing some changes that were carried out in the last minute (Gaffney & McCormick,
2017). A specific report had mentioned that Obama administration had informed the contracts
regarding the website around a month earlier to when it had been declared that customers
must register before they would be allowed to have a look at the prices for the introduced
plans. Some more last minute changes were carried out on the plans of the contractors when
they did not even complete their initial functionality of the system and tested it.
IT problems and what caused them
The website not only had issues in the designing as well as implementation, it further
had issues with some IT aspects, and some of the issues are as follows
Worst coding: the complete operating system of Windows 7 is consist of around 50
million lines of coding. Affordable Care Act website had around 500 million lines of coding.
According to numerous reports presented by the New York Times, numerous developers had

had resulted in expressing scepticism on this particular statistic, none of the developers
actually had the idea regarding the size of the coding (Anthopoulos, Reddick & Giannakidou,
2016). On the other hand, it had been fund that when customers tried to sign in into the
website their data was garbled and along with that in numerous cases, their data entry had
been unusable. The reports that had been sent to numerous companies that deal with
insurance had been riddled with countless errors such as mistake in syntax, duplicate data and
many more. Lack of proper coding had resulted in security issues as well (Real, McDermott
& Bertot, 2015). A specific error message from the website had relayed on the fact that
personal data is relayed in internet without any sort of encryption.
Improper usage of Data Tables: this had been considered as the nastiest wrongdoing
that was carried out by the professionals who were responsible for developing the website. A
particular open-source plug-in for the purpose of jQuery that improves the handling of data as
well as displaying the data. DataTables had been available in the form of GPL v2 as well as
BSD license (French, Homer & Gumus, 2016). The Affordable Care Act website did not
seem to keep the notes regarding the notices of copyright in that particular website. The
organization which is present behind the concept of DataTables had informed that it had been
very disappointing for them by the move that was carried out by Affordable Care Act
website.
Conclusion
From the above discussion that had been carried out it could be stated that around 12
million people had taken part in the exchanges that were created by the government. Besides
the success that was experienced by Affordable Care Act website, there had been a doubt on
the fact that the launching of the Affordable Care Act website had been marred with
numerous issues. A specific report that had been generated by Government Accountability

Office (GAO) had mentioned that there had been numerous insights in the various factor that
had been contributing in the launch of the website. The issues in the aspects of designing,
implementation and information technology had been mentioned in the essay above.

References
Anthopoulos, L., Reddick, C. G., Giannakidou, I., & Mavridis, N. (2016). Why e-government
projects fail? An analysis of the Healthcare. gov website. Government Information
Quarterly, 33(1), 161-173.
French, M. T., Homer, J., Gumus, G., & Hickling, L. (2016). Key provisions of the Patient
Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA): a systematic review and presentation of
early research findings. Health services research, 51(5), 1735-1771.
Gaffney, A., & McCormick, D. (2017). The Affordable Care Act: implications for health-care
equity. The Lancet, 389(10077), 1442-1452.
Real, B., McDermott, A. J., Bertot, J. C., & Jaeger, P. T. (2015). Digital inclusion and the
Affordable Care Act: Public libraries, politics, policy, and enrollment in
“Obamacare”. Public Library Quarterly, 34(1), 1-22.
Scherer, M. (2013, October). Traffic didn't crash the Obamacare site alone. Bad coding did
too (Links: Retrieved from
Tynan, W. D. (2016). Commentary: Integrated primary care psychology evolving with the
affordable care act. Journal of pediatric psychology, 41(10), 1165-1167.