HealthCare.gov is more than just a website on the Internet — more than just a dynamic HTML & CSS code. HealthCare.gov is the face and provider of health insurance. It is the virtual building for the Affordable Care Act. And the quality of our healthcare depends on it.
I’m not sure what’s worse: the utter failure of the Obamacare website or the fact that people continue to downplay or even ignore this problem.
Over and over again, naïve politicians and pundits clamor that the purpose of the Affordable Care Act is to provide healthcare, not perfect websites, that the publicity surrounding the website’s failures is politically charged and meaningless — that a website is simply not important.
And this punditry and blind defense of a website that is failing to play its instrumental role of providing health insurance for American citizens speaks to how out of touch our country is with the modern world.
In 1966, the Chicago Post Office, the largest in the country at the time, stopped working. The building simply could not perform its function anymore. The heavy postal machinery could not stand on the old, weak floors, and the building’s ceilings were too low for postal trucks and other utility operations. The result? Over 10 million pieces of mail filled the rooms of the building, completely and totally logjamed.
When this fiasco occurred, nobody came out to defend the United States Postal Service building. Nobody said the job of the postal service was to deliver mail, not to create highly efficient buildings. Nobody defended any part of the situation at all because they all unanimously knew it was a failure.
Why, then, are people reacting differently to the failed Obamacare website? Why do people keep insisting that the website — the very thing that gives Americans health insurance — has no connection to the healthcare law itself? The absurdity of this situation would be similar to people in 1966 refusing to acknowledge that the USPS building and the USPS services were deeply and inextricably tied together.
Perhaps the reason for this absurd reaction is a failure of many to realize we live in a modern world. Websites are the new buildings. The Internet is both the provider and the face of countless services provided to millions of Americans daily. When a website fails, the program fails.
Some of the most beautiful, exotic and efficient buildings in the United States are government buildings. From neo-classical to postmodern architecture, the design and function of these buildings have been carefully thought-out and implemented. The government has done this because they have realized throughout history that these buildings are its face, its public appearance. What’s more, the service the government provides literally depends on the functionality of its buildings.
It’s time for the government to put just as much thought and time into the websites they design as the country’s architecture. And it’s time for people to stop making excuses for why the government still — in 2013 — cannot build a website.