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Heathcare.gov to Go Down for Maintenance in Middle of Obamacare Enrollment
- randomerr 9y agoSunday is the best day for HealthCare.gov to go down for maintenance. Only 1-2% of your traffic through-out the week is done on Sunday for any healthcare. Plus the system has trouble scaling when Obama was in office. So planned down time seems reasonable to flatten data and process files to and from the Exchanges.
- croon 9y agoThey could phrase it better though. The downtime is announced as "Sundays, 12am-12pm ET". If there is, I'm not aware of any standard as to what that means.
- gberger 9y agoUhh.. It means 00:00 - 12:00, every Sunday. From midnight to noon. The first half of the day.
- yeukhon 9y agoMore specifically, Eastern Time, for those not familiar with U.S. timezones.
- croon 9y ago> Uhh.. It means 00:00 - 12:00, every Sunday. From midnight to noon. The first half of the day. Perhaps likely, but it's not as obvious as your phrasing makes it out to be. > To avoid confusion in, for example, an insurance certificate, it is always better to use the 24-hour clock, when 12:00 is 12 noon and, for example, 24:00 Sunday or 00:00 Monday both mean 12 midnight Sunday/Monday. It is common in transport timetables to use 23:59 Sunday or 00:01 Monday (in this example), or 11:59 p.m. or 12:01 a.m., to further reduce confusion. > There are no standards established for the meaning of 12 a.m. and 12 p.m. It is often said that 12 a.m. Monday is midnight on Monday morning and 12 p.m. is midday. http://www.npl.co.uk/reference/faqs/is-midnight-12-am-or-12-pm-faq-time http://www.npl.co.uk/reference/faqs/is-midnight-12-am-or-12-... It wouldn't cost them anything to be more explicit.
- astura 9y agoWe are talking about America, not the UK. "Sundays, 12am-12pm" has a well established meaning in the US. It's ambiguity in the UK (or elsewhere) is irreverent to a US audience. We should all move to 24 hour time, yes, there's absolutely no disagreements from me there. AM/PM confusion is completely unnecessary. However, 24 hour time is not used for anything in the US outside of a few industries (military, aviation, probably transportation). Not even train or bus schedules are given to the public in 24 hour time in the US (in my experience). If you used 24 hour time for anything at all while communicating with the general public you will confuse people. Especially the elderly. 00:00 is complete jibberish to the average American, so in this case they did the right thing given the audience. We do some (paper) logging at work and a (larger than I imagined) percentage of the workforce (including most people older than 50%) were very, very confused by it. (Even though the instructions are the very simple "if it's after noon add 12 to the hour.")
- DonHopkins 9y agoIt would cost them confusion to be more explicit, so they were as inexplicit and confusing as possible. And the more confusion, the fewer people will sign up, because confused people will plan their schedules around the wrong time. It's a brilliantly executed dark pattern! You'd think Karl Rove was still calling the shots.
- akvadrako 9y agoThere is some international confusion, but every American will know what it means; 12am is always midnight.
- comicjk 9y agoIf you did a survey on this, what fraction of adults do you think would get it right? 80%? Remember, this system is supposed to be used by anyone, including the poorly educated and recent immigrants.
- akvadrako 9y agoWell anyone who has ever encountered another 12am or 12pm before, which is fairly common. I would guess 99.9%
- comicjk 9y agoIf you assume that people remember the solutions to every problem they've ever encountered, I would not like to use the kind of user interface you would create! Here's the Wikipedia entry on the subject, which describes how 12am/12pm is actually a common confusion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-hour_clock#Confusion_at_noon_and_midnight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-hour_clock#Confusion_at_noo... Incidentally, 99.9% is going to be a bad guess for almost any survey answer because of the "lizard people effect" (4% of US adults say that the country is controlled by lizard people, 7% are not sure).
- akvadrako 9y agoDude, yes, more people will believe the Earth is flat than 12am in noon. The first time I worked outside the USA I was also pointed to that wikipedia article, but it in no way reflects reality on the streets.
- croon 9y ago> The style manual of the United States Government Printing Office used 12 a.m. for noon and 12 p.m. for midnight until its 2008 edition, when it reversed these designations.[14][15]
- spdustin 9y agoThat is incorrect. It was running effectively without nearly that much maintenance even last year, and there is no earthly reason for a site to need 12 hours of weekly downtime. It's not as if there are floors that need to be mopped or shelves that need to be stocked.
- modriano 9y ago- What's your source for that statistic? - Is that for all Healthcare.gov functions or just for signups? - How do the scaling issues that were solved over 4 years ago matter now? - Has the lack of this extreme and unheard-of level of "maintenance" downtime lead to prior problems large enough to make this a legitimate action rather than another disgusting attempt to sabotage the American healthcare system by making it harder for Americans to sign up?
- twobyfour 9y agoFor some sites only 1-2% of traffic is on weekends. But weekends are the only time many people have to research and select complicated health plan offerings.
- maxerickson 9y agoSunday mornings tend to be a convenient time for churches to do things like help people navigate the exchange. I'm not sure how much churches have done in past years though. Some information about how the site has been used during the announced downtimes in previous years would be a courageous act of journalism. Maybe some hero will tweet it so that all the online journalists can toss something up.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- yeukhon 9y agoWhat's the team now behind HealthCare.gov? Sadly last I looked up the ?? team only hires citizen / green card holder.
- yeukhon 9y agoI guess people don't want to tell me the name, that's why the downvote haha
- aaronhoffman 9y agoPeople have jumped on this as deliberate sabotage, but do we know any specifics? Has the team changed since 2016?
- morganvachon 9y agoI don't know which is harder to swallow, this administration's overt hatred of the American people as a whole, or the fact that the people it is hurting the most are its most fervent supporters.
- Ygg2 9y agoThey don't hate all people. Just people that aren't rich.
- akvadrako 9y agoHow is this on topic? healthcare.gov has been plagued with technical difficulties from the start, well before the current administration.
- samfisher83 9y agoIt says this in the article: >As part of its mission to translate the false narrative that the Affordable Care Act is failing into reality, Tom Price’s Health and Human Services Department has already announced massive cuts to the navigator programs that fund Obamacare outreach, as well as the budget for ads that alert Americans to the existence of the open-enrollment period. It just seems like a strange coincidence they need to shutdown the site during open enrollment.
- heartbreak 9y agoMaybe free bad press is how they plan to get the word out.
- dannyr 9y agoThere technical difficulties at the start but it has long been sorted out. See https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-secret-startup-saved-healthcare-gov-the-worst-website-in-america/397784/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-s...
- untog 9y agoIt's a valid complaint. The site's technical issues have been fixed for a long time. As the article says: given the administration’s previous efforts to sabotage the insurance markets, it’s not paranoid to view this maintenance schedule as a plan to keep down enrollment We're all technical folks here. What possible reason could there be to close the site every Sunday morning for 12 hours? In what situation would that ever be the best answer for users?
- thornygreb 9y agoI don't know if it is related, but a certain three letter agency we do business with is having an IT freeze from 9/21 to 10/3 which means no changes of any kind to any production system. In over 10 years this is the first I've seen something like it.
- Dowwie 9y agoit wouldn't surprise many if a FOIA analysis were to discover that this scheduled downtime were to coincide with the peak usage time for prior enrollments
- strictnein 9y agoPeak enrollments were Sunday morning? Before 9am for the west coast? That seems unlikely.
- epicide 9y agoI don't care if heathcare.gov goes down. Heath will just have to be on his own. If healthcare.gov goes down, though...
- yalogin 9y agoWow. This is so petty. They might hate it but I thought they would at least try to replace it and not hurt those that are using it. Shutting it down to reduce enrollment is beyond evil.
- loceng 9y agoI'm more and more surprised Americans aren't shutting down the entire country in protest.
- pfortuny 9y agohealth, please, mods, not heath...
- clebio 9y agooh, wow. you're right, but ... it's the source article's title! ouch.
- pfortuny 9y agosorry, did not look at the source! Thanks.
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y agoHey, old Heathkit oscilloscopes need care too!
- throwaway5752 9y agoPity that HN doesn't have the stomach for certain tech stories, rather than actually moderating content.