Programmers who worked to create the healthcare.gov website - the site responsible for allowing people to buy health insurance to comply with the Affordable Care Act that has experienced widespread problems since its launch - believe that they were hurried to make last-minute changes and had doubts that the site would be ready for its Oct. 1 debut, according to the Associated Press.
The Associated Press is reporting that project developers they spoke to anonymously - they feared that they would be fired if they revealed their names - expressed concerns that the deadlines set by the government were unrealistic and that they had been seeing potential problems with the site for months.
The complexity of the website is partially to blame for the problems that it has incurred. The website has to connect to many other government websites - Social Security Administration, the IRS, the Peace Corps and more - while verifying an insurance applicants background information, according to the Associated Press.
Another stumbling block that contractors are blaming for the issues is that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have been responsible for making sure that all of the pieces work together; this is an odd role for them to have taken on and many are saying that they do not have the capabilities to do an adequate job at it, according to the New York Times.
Contractors who are working on the site have been able to identify the source of many of the problems the site has encountered and they expect that it could take weeks to fix them all. Officials from the Obama administration reportedly asked if the site could be fully operational for a reboot on Nov. 1, a goal that contractors viewed as unrealistic, according to the New York Times.
During a speech President Barack Obama acknowledged that the site's glitches have made him angry although for the majority of the speech he attempted to downplay the problem; instead he talked about the parts of the new law that have been successful thus far.
One major opponent of the law, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., has announced that he will introduce a bill that postpones the individual mandate requiring people to purchase insurance by the end of the year until the website has been up and running for six consecutive months, according to U.S. News and World Report.
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, seized on a statement made by the president on Monday when he released a statement showing his support for Rubio's proposal.
"The president did get one thing right yesterday: ObamaCare is 'more than just a website' - it's a fundamentally-flawed law that is putting Americans' jobs, health insurance and financial security at risk," Boehner said in a statement. "That's why they deserve the same 'good deal' insurance companies and big businesses got when the president delayed the law's mandates for them, while leaving the rest of America on the hook. It's a matter of basic fairness."
