The Failure of Central Planning Illustrated
The website launched to sign citizens up for Obamacare was a major crash and burn this week. The site Healthcare.gov was overwhelmed by citizens trying, and failing, to register for the new government healthcare plan. The Chief Technology Officer for the site complained that the technology would work… if there weren’t so many people.
We at The Libertarian Republic are very sympathetic to webmasters with that kind of problem. This website launched with average traffic estimates admittedly much lower than Healthcare.gov, but now serves an audience of 2-3 million unique visitors a month. That’s very difficult to provide content to without some minor mishaps along the way. But what’s the difference? TLR doesn’t have the full power of a federal budget and institutions of the federal government with which to handle the loads of traffic and requests to our site. Obamacare is the perfect example of how a bloated bureaucracy, with no profit motive, fails at providing resources to a disparate community even with seemingly limitless resources.
The CTO Todd Park admitted that they goofed in how many users to expect, thinking that 50,000 to 60,000 simultaneous users may attempt to connect. However the site has drawn as many as 250,000 since its launch on October 1st. The site has crashed for numerous users and been plagued with people complaining about not being able to register, long wait times on the phone and unhelpful live chat features. Park admitted that they just couldn’t handle the traffic. “These bugs were functions of volume,” Park said. “Take away the volume and it works.”
More than 8.1 million people have visited the site since inception.
