Recently, almost twenty million USA residents faced the problem of their inability to use the Affordable Care Act’s website established by President Obama. Many people complain that their login information cannot be entered sometimes. Therefore, they are not able to access some necessary files. The following paper is intended to discuss the question and identify particular issues that led to the Affordable Care Act website’s inappropriate work.
The Biggest Mistakes in the ACA Website Code
It is a well-known fact that the Affordable Care Act website does not work correctly sometimes. Such a situation happens because of the tremendous number of people using it simultaneously (Bleiberg & West, 2016). Some patients need to receive financial support for their prescription drugs and medical treatment. Many other individuals are obliged to use the website according to their law (medical personnel and insurance companies). Unfortunately, sometimes people cannot use the services established by President Obama because of particular problems of the source’s technical part. The most significant mistakes that were made when designing and implementing a necessary code for the Affordable Care Act website will be specified below.
The first major mistake of the ACA website code is its overwhelming amount of “cookie” files used on one page. Such an issue does not let users of the site access their personal accounts for particular needs or information (Ornstein, 2013). Professional IT developers claim that this problem is caused by the fact that the website was not precisely tested before it was launched.
It would be proper to mention that the former President of the United States of America always said that all the ACA website breakdowns happen due to the source’s popularity. However, IT specialists noted that the design of the site was not elaborated properly. Therefore, this factor might also cause various failures. Moreover, the architecture of the website does not meet the primary safety requirements of any development team. The given problem might be caused only by the fact that the system was invented in a rush and some of its pages were not tested.
Another problem was caused by certain errors not eliminated by programmers at the first level of the project development. This issue delivers false or incomprehensible data to some health insurance companies involved in the program mentioned above (Merkow & Raghavan, 2010). Therefore, employees of these firms cannot be aware of the righteousness of the information they receive. Due to this issue, they do not have any right to use the corrupted data in the future for other purposes required by patients.
It would be essential to mention that the website has been facing regular breakdowns for three weeks in a row. This fact made President Obama admit that the source’s system had multiple mistakes that remained unaddressed for an extended period. However, the site was working properly and did not present any technical issues when it was just launched, as many people had a chance to use it and its services (Whitman, 2015). Nevertheless, as the number of users has increased recently, the code turned out to be unsafe and unfinished. All these factors prove that the development team had a limited time to finish its work. The governmental projects had to be released quickly due to the terms set by the former President. Unfortunately, the lack of testing and elaborating on the issue was impossible at that development stage, which causes a plethora of problems nowadays.
Discussion
By analyzing all the information mentioned above and facing particular errors that recently emerged on the Affordable Care Act website, it is possible to see that the password complexity of it is not enforced. In contrast, user credentials expire after a certain period (Alsmadi & Shanab, 2016). Also, professionals stated that such standards for authentication and identity management as LDAP and SAML were not used in the code of the site mentioned above (Franklin, Gelles, Ostrovsky, & Schulman, 2013). The main issues emerge when undergoing the process of authorization. Also, the data validation and its delivery to back-end users are not always competent and accurate. It would be proper to mention that residents of particular states can see the white screen when they try to access the ACA website (Goldstein, 2016). Perhaps, this issue is caused by various session management mistakes in the code or particular restrictions imposed on users because of their locations (Merkow & Raghavan, 2010). The website’s error handling was poor because the errors described above were not eliminated immediately. “An error message from the site relayed personal information over the internet without encryption, while the email verification system could be bypassed without access to the email account” (Scherer, 2013, para. 5). Moreover, users might receive some messages that inform them about particular breakdowns in the system.
Conclusion
The Affordable Care Act website had multiple breakdowns due to the lack of its system’s testing and time limits imposed on the development team during the procedure of the source’s creation. Professional programmers claim that errors also emerge because the ACA site’s security is weak and has to be improved to avoid similar mistakes in the future. The majority of the governmental source’s users faced the problem of logging in and receiving the exact information sent by other individuals previously.
References
Alsmadi, I., & Shanab, E. A. (2016). E-government website security concerns and citizens adoption. Electronic Government, an International Journal, 12(3), 243. Web.
Bleiberg, J., & West, D. M. (2016). A look back at technical issues with Healthcare.gov [Blog post]. Web.
Franklin, M., Gelles, R., Ostrovsky, R., & Schulman, L. J. (2013). Optimal coding for streaming authentication and interactive communication. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 61(1), 258-276. Web.
Goldstein, A. (2016). HHS failed to heed many warnings that HealthCare.gov was in trouble. Web.
Merkow, M. S., & Raghavan, L. (2010). Secure and resilient software development. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
Ornstein, C. (2013). Here’s why Healthcare.gov broke down. Web.
Scherer, M. (2013). Traffic didn’t crash the Obamacare site alone. Bad coding did too.Web.
Whitman, E. (2015). Obamacare website failure analysis: Why site crashed so often during 2013 launch and mishandled $600M in contracts. Web.