web applications

Health Exchanges Need A Fail Whale

In a blog post on Veracode’s blog today, I write about the problems encountered at government-run online health exchanges that were intended to connect millions to private insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act. The exchanges opened to the public on Tuesday, and they got off to a rocky start, with reports of web sites paralyzed as millions of uninsured Americans logged on to sign up for subsidized health insurance. In some cases, the problems appear to have been caused by “external factors.” New York State’s online health exchange was felled by the weight of more than 10 million requests of dubious origin, The New York Post reported. But other exchanges, including Healthcare.gov the federal government’s main health insurance storefront, which is used by residents or more than half of the states, were victims of their own success: overwhelmed when the doors swung open and millions of eager customers poured […]