Update On The New And Improved ObamaCare Website; Security Not Built Into ObamaCare Website

Updates

Later, 10:46 pm CT, local:  in addition to everything else, it turns out the ObamaCare website was never built with "security built in." CNBC is reporting (for all the supporters of the ObamaCare website, note that these are not my comments. The story comes from CNBC):

It could take a year to secure the risk of "high exposures" of personal information on the federal Obamacare online exchange, a cybersecurity expert told CNBC on Monday.

"When you develop a website, you develop it with security in mind. And it doesn't appear to have happened this time," said David Kennedy, a so-called "white hat" hacker who tests online security by breaching websites. He testified on Capitol Hill about the flaws of HealthCare.gov last week. [Does anyone take Congressional testimony serious any more?]

"It's really hard to go back and fix the security around it because security wasn't built into it," said Kennedy, chief executive of TrustedSec. "We're talking multiple months to over a year to at least address some of the critical-to-high exposures on the website itself."

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversaw the implementation of the website, the components used to build the site are compliant with standards set by Federal security authorities.

There you have it: the "components used to build the site are compliant with standards set by Federal security authorities." Reminder: Consumer Reports advises folks to avoid the ObamaCare website.

 Original Post

Cyber Monday for Amazon.

Amateur hour for ObamaCare.

As you read the report from the linked article below, remember that Amazon plans to ship more than 1 million separate items every hour today, cyber-Monday. I don't know how many visitors the Amazon website can handle at any given time, but I would assume the average order is four separate items, meaning that 250,000 folks are ordering every hour. In additon, two, three, four times that number maybe checking out prices and products at Amazon. And, when the 250,000 folks order their products every hour, they are also paying for them. Amazon has a cash flow.

On the other hand, after all the fixes, it appears that the ObamaCare website is unable to handle more than 40,000 users, even less than what they had "promised," and a fraction of what Amazon can handle. And from what I can tell, Amazon is selling hundreds of millions of products at millions of different prices, whereas the ObamaCare website offers a choice of probably not more than ten or twelve different plans. And no one is paying for their health care policies yet. The Washington Post is reporting:

Around 10 a.m. Monday morning, the Obama administration began using queuing software to meter entry into the HealthCare.gov Web site. At the time, the site had fewer than 40,000 users, somewhere in the "mid-30,000" range, as Medicare spokeswoman Julie Bataille put it.

"As we looked at error rates, that was the team's determination," Bataille said.

Most notably, the queuing system went up before HealthCare.gov hit its planned target of handling 50,000 concurrent users. When pressed on this point, Bataille referred to a separate metric that the administration has used to measure success: that 800,000 people be able to use the Web site in a single day.

"The idea is that we said the site would be able to handle 800,000 in the course of a day," Bataille said. "What we wanted to do today, with the new upgrades and to ensure the most optimal experience, was deploy the queuing system...so that people would have the most optimal experience possible. We are working through this in real time."

One interesting "fix": if the system is overwhelmed it no longer says it is "down." Instead, the site says it is really, really busy, and tells the user to sign in anyway, and stand in the queue until some unknown time in the future.

This is truly amateur hour. Again, folks are simply looking at various insurance plans, and, at best, "putting a plan in their cart." They are not actually paying for anything. That software has not been written yet.

The insurance companies are paying claims as we speak and will be paying claims for high risk patients starting January 1, 2014. They need a cash flow -- i.e., premiums -- to pay those claims.

It matters now what the politicians say now, or how they count users, enrollees, buyers. Come next March 15th, and April 15th, and May 15th, if the insurance companies haven't enrolled 7 million new premium payers, these companies are going to start getting nervous. Next summer may be very, very interesting. I remember watching CNBC that summer day back in 2000 when the bubble burst and the market tanked. One almost gets the feeling that we may see a repeat for the smaller health insurance companies next summer.

I don't know, but no one is talking about cash flow. All anyone is talking about is accessing the ObamaCare website and it seems not to be happening.