Reuters is reporting that the Department of Health & Human Services will not sign its final agreements with health insurance carriers selling on the federal exchange next week as was planned but are instead delaying until mid-September.
Reuters' sources attributed the delay to "it to technology problems involving the display of insurance products within the federal information technology system." This echoes what I've heard from some of the insurers I work with, who have reported that the plan displays are, to use one client's words, "a total mess."
Have built and deployed numerous health insurance shopping and enrollment systems in the past, I can pretty much guess precisely what they are dealing with. When you're building a system and working with test data, you try to plan in advance for everything you are going to see. But, when the full set of real data comes in all sorts of glitches--some minor, some dreadful--can crop up.
For example, carriers put longer pieces of text than you expected in a product description and suddenly the text starts wrapping bizarrely or gets cut off. The job that loads the data from the files submitted by the carriers mangles some data or puts it in the wrong place. Non-alphanumeric characters play havoc with your HTML.
All of these things are normal and to be expected. It's something you have to deal with when launching any new system into production. The only problem here is that the systems are going live with one big bang with a lot of public scrutiny and media attention trained upon them.
Expect a lot of this over the upcoming months as the exchanges work through all the normal kinks. The joys of v.1.0 software . . .
Reuters' sources attributed the delay to "it to technology problems involving the display of insurance products within the federal information technology system." This echoes what I've heard from some of the insurers I work with, who have reported that the plan displays are, to use one client's words, "a total mess."
Have built and deployed numerous health insurance shopping and enrollment systems in the past, I can pretty much guess precisely what they are dealing with. When you're building a system and working with test data, you try to plan in advance for everything you are going to see. But, when the full set of real data comes in all sorts of glitches--some minor, some dreadful--can crop up.
For example, carriers put longer pieces of text than you expected in a product description and suddenly the text starts wrapping bizarrely or gets cut off. The job that loads the data from the files submitted by the carriers mangles some data or puts it in the wrong place. Non-alphanumeric characters play havoc with your HTML.
All of these things are normal and to be expected. It's something you have to deal with when launching any new system into production. The only problem here is that the systems are going live with one big bang with a lot of public scrutiny and media attention trained upon them.
Expect a lot of this over the upcoming months as the exchanges work through all the normal kinks. The joys of v.1.0 software . . .
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