Can human agents handle the 7 million applicants needed to make it work (at least early on)? And they'll still need computer support, I presume you're only talking about taking the place of the front end web site.
Trying to do 7 million identity checks manually? Well, maybe something can be kludged to speed that up. On the other hand subsidy calculations had better be done by computer, and that's not working reliably right now; it could probably be Tiger Teamed into something that works and at scale, a simple calculator (heck, I bet it could be done in Javascript).
But again I get to the biggest problem of management. Starting at the very top, the CEO of this organization (Obama, per his Rose Garden event earlier today), they're in (public) denial of how bad the problem. In part they can't help it, they aren't experienced IT people, they aren't like us who can look at less than 1,000 words of clues and know "it's fucked".
Really salvaging anything out of this needs decisiveness. E.g. to get your kludge working for 2014---and again I note the critical detail of subsidies, especially since the only plan that can now be offered is gold-plated (e.g. coverage of your children through age 26) and inherently very expensive even before you get to community rating (everyone under 50 is to pay a bundle to cover the 50-64 set)---someone would have to decide to start it now. "Wastefully", in parallel with trying to get the site to work. As it is, millions are losing their old-fashioned high deductible major medical polices as of Jan 1st, things start getting really bad for a lot of people really soon.
If this nightmare drags out to 2016 (which today we can't discount, and that's even counting the website or its substitutes vaguely working), do you really expect it to be the law of the land by 2018?
Trying to do 7 million identity checks manually? Well, maybe something can be kludged to speed that up. On the other hand subsidy calculations had better be done by computer, and that's not working reliably right now; it could probably be Tiger Teamed into something that works and at scale, a simple calculator (heck, I bet it could be done in Javascript).
But again I get to the biggest problem of management. Starting at the very top, the CEO of this organization (Obama, per his Rose Garden event earlier today), they're in (public) denial of how bad the problem. In part they can't help it, they aren't experienced IT people, they aren't like us who can look at less than 1,000 words of clues and know "it's fucked".
Really salvaging anything out of this needs decisiveness. E.g. to get your kludge working for 2014---and again I note the critical detail of subsidies, especially since the only plan that can now be offered is gold-plated (e.g. coverage of your children through age 26) and inherently very expensive even before you get to community rating (everyone under 50 is to pay a bundle to cover the 50-64 set)---someone would have to decide to start it now. "Wastefully", in parallel with trying to get the site to work. As it is, millions are losing their old-fashioned high deductible major medical polices as of Jan 1st, things start getting really bad for a lot of people really soon.
If this nightmare drags out to 2016 (which today we can't discount, and that's even counting the website or its substitutes vaguely working), do you really expect it to be the law of the land by 2018?