Reactions to the Healthcare.gov "Obamacare" Website

I am not particularly sympathetic to the finger-pointing by the healthcare.gov contractors, that HHS should have left more time for testing the website before it went live, because they knew that there was a "drop dead" date by which the website had to go live. When I heard one of the contractors testify that their company didn't warn HHS of the need for a longer testing period, ostensibly because it wasn't their job, I had to roll my eyes. If you think it will take a month or two to integrate your work into website, and you know that the integration must be complete and tested inside of two weeks, it's your job to speak up - and to do so as soon as you realize that there's a problem.

I tried to use the website on day one. The site was clearly overwhelmed. My reaction to that? "I'll try again later." Yes, it would have been nice to get through the initial registration and set up an account, and it would have been nice had HHS anticipated the massive number of people who would try out the site when it went live, but this sort of thing happens.

What I didn't anticipate, when I went back to use the site, was an experience that suggested not only that the programmers didn't care about serve load, but that they built elements of the website that seemed to frequently and unnecessarily load the server. Oh, I'm sure lots of stuff is going on in the background, but when you're simply entering your personal information... why? And why so inefficiently? If the website is overwhelmed, it would make more sense to collect the information without doing all of the back-end data crunching and, when the basic information was collected, tell applicants, "It will take approximately X hours to process your application. We will notify you by email when your application has been processed. If you would like a text message, please enter your email address or cell phone number below."

When I went back to the site, I was able to complete the registration process, but received server error messages telling me to log back in later three times over that relatively short process. To the site's credit, I only lost data one time. One minor annoyance was having to enter the same information several times, with no ability to simply click a "same as last time"-type option to pull in the data already entered. Another was with the editing process. You have to enter SSNs for people who will be part of your application. For security reasons, the SSNs are obfuscated, with the last six numbers replaced by asterisks, when you edit the personal information for any person who is part of your application. But if you don't delete those asterisks and re-enter the SSN you will get an error message. That's the sort of inattention to detail that can make a website less pleasant to use - I wonder what percentage of applicants think that the asterisks reflect the website's retention of the data, such that it doesn't have to be re-entered, only to get that error message. If you have to enter the SSN anyway, don't populate the field with asterisks. Leave it blank, perhaps with an explanation, "For security reasons your SSN is not displayed on this page. Please re-enter the number before you proceed."

Another oddity is the navigation of the various steps of the application process. The site displays the steps you must take, and those you have not yet completed, but there's no "click here to continue" type prompt. You have to guess where to click. It's not that it's difficult to guess, but I've heard from a person who I would have thought would have figured it out and he was stymied.

When available plans are displayed, you can compare plans. You can select as many as you want to compare, but the comparison page only shows three plans at a time. The comparison page is decent, with the plan broken down into areas of coverage with subheadings for the elements of coverage within a given area. The problem is, if you choose the option to delete the plan in the first column, those subheadings go away making it e difficult to compare plans. They do not reappear even if you go to the next page of plans selected for comparison - for the subheadings to reappear you need to restart the comparison process.

Finally, when selecting a plan I received a large warning that the plan did not include dental coverage for minors. It did. The problem suggests that the data about each plan and its components is included in redundant fields, as if the plan can properly display the coverage it provides there is no reason why the verification algorithm would get it wrong.

Mistakes like these aren't just indicative of limited testing by HHS. They are indicative of limited testing by the contractors who developed the UI for the website, and more than that they suggest to me that the programmers were largely indifferent to the user experience. The delays in processing data suggest that programmers were largely, perhaps, completely, indifferent to server load.

I used the online chat service to verify that I could rely upon the plan description despite the warning message. Response time was prompt and the person providing support was professional and efficient.

If I were the programmer responsible for any of the problems on this site, I wouldn't be pointing fingers. I would be apologizing and redoubling my efforts to fix it. With Republican demagoguery on the law and now on the website, it's easy to point fingers but really - based upon the types of problems and issues I experienced, the programmers bear the lion's share of responsibility for the problems with the site they programmed.

If you want to browse basic pricing information for the sites included in healthcare.gov, but don't want to register yet, unofficial information is available courtesy of Stephen P. Morse.

Why Won't Romney Defend Outsourcing?

Under the guise of balance, Fred Hiatt's editorial board has produced an unsigned editorial that basically accuses President Obama of being a meany-pants to Mitt Romney, right down to the cheap tactic I commented on the other day, taking the most extreme comment by a low-level campaign staffer, and pretending that it's representative. Not that we should be surprised, because that tactic was employed by one of Hiatt's own columnists. Hiatt and his board complain,

According to the Obama campaign, Mr. Romney’s claim of non-involvement in the fateful three years can’t be squared with some sworn documents he signed that describe him as Bain’s chief after 1999.

You might think that their next move would be to explain the consistency - to explain why Romney's claim that he departed Bain in 1999 can be squared with the SEC filings he signed stating that he continued to serve as CEO, President and sole shareholder. Alas, no, you instead get the predictable resort to the staffer - a resort to ridicule - followed by huffing that the issue is not "serious" because the matter has not been referred to the Justice Department. I guess that's consistent with Hiatt's apparent view on everything from how the nation ends up at war to torture and indefinite imprisonment to the financial industry debacle - unless somebody goes to jail, it can't possibly be serious.

Hiatt's crew uses the term "squabbling", which isn't at all accurate. A squabble is an argument. There's no argument here. What we are instead seeing is the Obama campaign goading Mitt Romney, and Romney reacting in a manner that serves primarily to draw attention to the fact that he's not being honest. No, I don't mean that Romney's refusal to speak candidly about his exact ties with Bain means that he was in fact actively managing his company, nor that his refusal to disclose his tax returns means that he has engaged in financial misconduct. But it's reasonable to infer that a person who says "I have nothing to hide", who then refuses to document his claims, is in fact hiding something. Hiatt's crew is simply giving him cover.

It is reasonable to note that many of the columnists who work for the Post are right-wing partisans, serving up one hackish attack after another on the President. The fact that Hiatt doesn't mind the fact that the editorial and op/ed pages of his paper, print and electronic, are consistently full of childish attacks on the President from the likes of Jennifer Rubin, William Kristol, David Gerson, Kathleen Parker, Charles Krauthammer, George Will, Mark Thiessen, Ed Rogers... well, it's pretty clear that his paper isn't actually concerned about attacks that are hyperbolic, "derivative" or unfair. How many column inches of unsigned editorial space has the editorial board devoted to pushing back against right-wing depictions of the President as a socialist - an accusation presently being pushed by some of its aforementioned columnists? How many inches to pushing back against Romney's absurd accusation that Obama went on an "apology tour"? Would that be... none? How about individually? Any?

One response Hiatt might give is that not enough people buy into those arguments. That despite their being pervasively pushed by the right, notions of Obama as a socialist, Mitt Romney's fabricated "apology tour", birtherism, and the like don't matter because nobody who is informed or knowledgeable will fall for them. Never mind that if the proponents of those attacks agreed they would find some other nonsense to push. But that suggests an editorial board less concerned with truth than with rushing to the defense of a candidate who they see as flailing, and it would seem like a pretty thin rationalization for not taking similarly strong positions against the many false accusations raised against the President. Must a candidate be visibly drowning before he gets this type of lifeline?

The Board then attempts to do what Romney is unwilling to do: it attempts to make a case for the upside of outsourcing and offshoring. First they claim that international outsourcing (offshoring) creates as many jobs as it destroys, omitting the caveats that some of the people displaced by outsourcing will not find work in the same sector (i.e., will need to retrain and will likely never again achieve their former level of income) and that the study begins in 2000 ends in 2007 a very limited window that largely corresponds with the housing bubble and ends before the "great recession". They also argue that as corporations invest in foreign enterprises, they also invest in their domestic operations (albeit at a much lower level).

Are you seeing the problem here? The Post does, offering a small amount of sympathy followed by a large dose of condescension for displaced workers:

Of course, such studies are cold comfort to people who lose jobs, even temporarily. American workers’ anxiety is understandable, and an inclination to seek scapegoats in the executive suite, or overseas, is not surprising.

The condescension continues,

It is unsettling to realize that we are vulnerable to the same vicissitudes of international commerce with which other peoples have been coping for decades.

Is the editorial board seriously suggesting that Romney make that argument? It would be awkward enough for Romney to argue that outsourcing is a necessary evil in the global marketplace, helping to keep companies competitive both domestically and internationally, sometimes discretionary but in today's world often necessary, with the unfortunate effect that some workers will be displaced and blue collar wages will be significantly and permanently reduced. First, the populations of displaced workers who cannot find jobs or whose earning capacity has been permanently reduced are not going to buy into the conceit of "You win some, you lose some" or "It may be that the executives of your company got richer than ever while firing you and shipping your job to Asia, but don't go scapegoating them." Second, displaced workers are not going to respond well to the argument that "People in the developing world have suffered from low wages and job insecurity for many years, and they cope - why can't you?"

The editorial board lectures,

The president knows that the globalization of markets, including the market for labor, is irreversible, which is why he hasn’t proposed policies even remotely commensurate with his campaign’s alarmism. Rather, he’s for boosting education and infrastructure and tweaking the taxation of multinational firms’ foreign profits. If anyone has sounded protectionist, it’s Mr. Romney, who has promised to risk a trade conflict with China by labeling that country a currency manipulator.

What alarmism? His campaign has challenged Romney to explain how his record at Bain qualifies him to be President, and Romney has not been able to do so. His campaign challenged Romney to explain Bain's role in outsourcing jobs, and rather than explaining the economics of outsourcing or how it helped Bain's investments he's been whining, "That wasn't me, that was some other guy." That's pretty much it.

Meanwhile, no, Romney is not about to start a trade war with China. Even if they're unaware of the underlying facts, or don't care to point them out to Romney, I doubt that there's a person on the editorial board who doesn't recognize Romney's demagoguery for what it is.

You know what Romney could do? He could say, "You know what? The President and I are in agreement on outsourcing. We both know that it's a reality, there are sound economic reasons for outsourcing, and that it brings some genuine good to our society along with the bad. The President and I agree that we should help workers who are displaced by outsourcing and try to find ways to rebuild and maintain a strong middle class." But... he won't.

At the end, I'm reminded of my reaction to Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson - that the board is feigning disdain at a "squabble", oblivious to the fact that their part of the problem. But who knows - perhaps they're reveling in that fact. As their roster of right-wing columnists attests, they're not concerned with fairness and objectivity, and are happy to publish below-the-belt attacks. After all, if it sells papers, columns and page views, they make money.

In an ideal world, the president and his challenger would acknowledge that “creative destruction” is part of what helps an economy grow, while discussing the most cost-effective means of limiting and healing workers’ short-run pain. Alas, we don’t live in that world.

"Alas," says the paper that's part of the problem.

Do Right-To-Work Laws Hurt State Economies

We all know the conventional wisdom on right-to-work laws:

"Proponents argue that it creates jobs, on the theory that there are a bunch of anti-union employers who will flock to whatever state passes the law ... Opponents dispute that claim, and argue that all it does it allow employers in those states to pay workers less and give them fewer health and pension benefits. They claim it is part of the race to the bottom that corporations encourage and that Republican politicians are more than happy to implement in exchange for the huge political contributions to their campaigns."

Under either philosophy, the idea is that jobs shift from union to non-union states, and for decades that pattern was beyond dispute. But in this post-NAFTA, internationalized era, might the story have changed?

Only one state has passed right to work since NAFTA: Oklahoma in 2001. (Before that, the most recent was Idaho in 1985.) About a year ago, Lafer and economist Sylvia Allegretto published a report for the Economic Policy Institute* exploring just what had happened in the decade since Oklahomans got their "right to work." The results weren't pretty.

Rather than increasing job opportunities, the state saw companies relocate out of Oklahoma. In high-tech industries and those service industries "dependent on consumer spending in the local economy" the laws appear to have actually damaged growth. At the end of the decade, 50,000 fewer Oklahoma residents had jobs in manufacturing. Perhaps most damning, Lafer and Allegretto could find no evidence that the legislation had a positive impact on employment rates.

Given that the U.S. can no longer win a "race to the bottom" in terms of wages, perhaps we've moved into an era in which it's more important to offer communities sufficiently attractive to professionals and skilled labor than to offer the cheapest domestic wage for factory line workers. A company that has so little loyalty to state and community that it will relocate half-way around the country to save money on labor will have no more regard for the new community when the total cost of production is cheaper outside of the United States. Whether or not you believe there is a moral factor involved, that's the story of modern manufacturing and a company that doesn't shave production costs is apt to be undersold by cheaper imported goods.

For a state like Michigan, my approach might be to try to create an environment in which certain hub communities, offering a good lifestyle to workers, a highly educated and highly skilled workforce, and other factors that could attract workers at the top of the market, are at the center of a manufacturing hub, such that manufacturers can have a reasonable expectation of being able to find local (or near-local) suppliers, labor, and support. I don't know if it will work, but it seems to beat trying to drive down labor costs to compete with other states, starving communities of the tax base they need to fund schools, recreation, roads (already bad enough in Michigan), and other factors that make for an appealing community. If the effort fails, it all falls apart anyway, so why not try?

Comcast - The Worst Product Support in the World?

If you have Comcast, at one point or another you have probably had to try to navigate through their voice mail system. And you've probably experienced how it includes helpful suggestions such as, when you're calling over a loss of Internet connectivity, suggesting that you use their online support to address the problem. The navigation to product support is so cumbersome, and the hold times are so long, it seems as if they designed their phone support system to get people to give up and hang up long before they reach a real person. It can easily take half an hour to reach a live person.

As a basic rule of thumb, if you are having recurring problems with all of your services at the same time the source of problem will typically be somewhere between the utility pole and your in-home devices. If you are having problems with some services while others function well, and the resetting of your cable box or cable modem doesn't fix the problem, odds are the problem is Comcast's.

A while back I worked through their phone support to ask about a repeated problem with Internet and phone connectivity. Cable TV was working, so I expected to find that the problem was at Comcast's end. By the time I got through the problem had resolved itself, their "computer" didn't indicate that there was any work going on in my area, and they couldn't test for the source of the problem because the system was working. "Call back when the problem is still going on." So I did just that, via cell phone, again working through their ridiculous menu and tolerating their excessive wait times, and was told that this time their "computer" indicated that there was work going on in my area so that was "probably" the source of the outage.

I indicated that the problem had been recurring, that in the past I had difficulty getting through their phone system before the problems cleared up, and that it would be very helpful if they could provide a direct number so that I could more easily have somebody test for the source of the problem when it happened again. "We don't have a direct line." Well, I find that difficult - but not impossible - to believe. Many years ago I had phone service through a carrier that deliberately didn't assign direct lines to customer support so that you couldn't bypass their menu system (unless you're a VIP, because pretty much every company has special support numbers for special people, but ordinary customers aren't special). Intentionally terrible customer service. So here I am again, hearing a story that tells me either that the support person is lying to me or that Comcast is giving intentionally terrible product support for customers with repeat problems.

Now, let me travel back in time a few years. I had a cable installer come to the house to install high speed Internet and, as part of that process, he tested the completed installation including the television. He recommended setting a PIN for pay-per-view, both because that way we couldn't accidentally order a PPV movie and because children grow up and figure out how to use remote controls. Fair enough. It was a simple process, and the installer demonstrated it in action.

Fast forward to the present. My daughter, using the xfinity iPad app, manages to order a PPV show without entering the PIN. I check online and sure enough, the website suggests that this is not possible.

If the program is protected by your parental control settings, you will need to use your Comcast remote to enter the 4-digit PIN you have established.

The Internet is working so, why not? I'll try that online support they recommend over their inefficient phone support system. I explain the problem and get an obvious boilerplate reply, not responsive to the issue. I cycle through that a few times and then finally get a boilerplate reply indicating that their current system uses two separate PINs, both the parental control PIN and a purchase PIN. even though you won't find any mention of a separate "purchase PIN" in their Xfinity TV App FAQ, and even though this was a reprogramming of their system to effectively turn off the PIN protection I had previously implemented, I was at fault for not knowing that the system had changed.

Email support provides little but cut-and-paste answers, each from a new support person who identifies his or herself by "name" and then disappears into the ether. There's no continuity of service. Each email goes to a new person who has no knowledge of the history of the exchange, and no apparent interest in reading that history. Half don't even seem interested in, or perhaps it's capable of, understanding what you are saying.

Within that context, I received a cut-and-paste response instructing me how to set the "purchase PIN". So I go to the television to set the purchase PIN and, sure enough, the instructions are wrong. I find the exact same, incorrect instructions on Comcast's website. Wonderful. So I muddle around in the menus to find where they've buried the setting and create the purchase PIN. I then respond to Comcast explaining that their instruction was incorrect, that the instruction on their website was incorrect, and a walkthrough of the actual steps to set the purchase PIN. I also informed them that the instructions on their website for setting up a parental control PIN were also out-of-date.

The "helpful" response I received? Instructions on how to set up a parental control PIN. That's right, the one PIN that was set from the beginning. And the instruction on how to set that PIN? A cut-and-paste version of the same instruction from their website that I had just informed them was inaccurate.

The biggest problem, it would seem, is that Comcast has outsourced its email support services to the developing world and that although it's staff is competent to cut-and-paste simple answers to simple questions, many or most of their support staff lack the English language skills to respond to anything more than a simple question and instead scan for keywords or phrases to try to figure out what the customer is asking about.

At the end of this, having failed to understand my inquiry, failed to provide accurate information, and failed to correct their cut-and-paste "support" materials even after being put on explicit notice of their erroneous content, one of their reps not-so-helpfully suggested that I send feedback to some other division of Comcast to give feedback on my customer support experience. Here's the thing: When it's clear that they've dropped the ball on customer service, a customer service representative should take the initiative to pass along the issue to customer care himself.

Cue from above: A bluebird just flew past my window and, while not knowing if it is in fact the bluebird of happiness, it's time to move on to happier thoughts.