9 ms·

How Kentucky Built the Country's Best Obamacare Website

97 points by scarmig 13y ago

Aqueous 13y ago
A site that looks like garbage but works really well is much better than a site that looks good but doesn't work at all.
- frandroid 13y ago
  It has worked for Craigslist and eBay for a very long time...
  - masklinn 13y ago
    And the early google.
- jackfoxy 13y ago
  Correctness is the dog. Everything else is tail. Don't know who said that first, might have been this guy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1lpKBMkgg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1lpKBMkgg
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- hga 13y ago
  Hmmm, do you really think it looks like "garbage"? I'm a back end developer, don't claim to have much taste in these things, but it strikes me as simple and straightforward, maybe not pretty, but not ugly. And their images: tiny. Home page 32K, the one for individuals and families 26K. The old home page picture that used to be on Healthcare.gov is now gone, but I recall someone saying it, or another picture on the site, weighed in at 1.8M.
  - gtaylor 13y ago
    As a fellow backend developer, this KY site doesn't look ugly to me. It looks minimal, seems to be pretty easy to get around, and seems to fulfill its purpose very well. It loads incredibly fast, and the text is all easy to understand. I'll take bland and functional over pretty and awkward any day when it's something this important to so many. Whoever did this for KY did a great job, IMO.
  - bmelton 13y ago
    Not that my opinion matters at all, but I do think that it looks like garbage. That said, I agree that whether it looks like garbage or gold, all of that is secondary to whether or not it works correctly, and it seems to (not first-hand knowledge, nor am I a Kentucky resident.)
- alayne 13y ago
  It doesn't look like garbage to me https://kyenroll.ky.gov/ https://kyenroll.ky.gov/.
mathattack 13y ago
Forcing simplicity during design seems like a great way to avoid the complexity that takes over many larger projects. Too bad this couldn't be done nationally. I'm curious what the cost of this system was. Or perhaps more importantly, what's the cost per person that will ultimately be covered.
keithwarren 13y ago
3 month design, 3 month build, 3 month test Keep it simple. That was the philosophy. Don't bother reading the article, I just summed up the only info that wasn't just there to take up space. Disappointing that this was light on any real details like who the contractor was, or if it was done by state employees. What the integration story was? Technology? Staffing count? Budget? You know, all those things which would speak to 'How' Kentucky built the site.
- keithwarren 13y ago
  Just looked it up, running ASP.NET MVC 4. Not surprising, tech concentration is pretty regional and this part of the country is very heavily Microsoft focused.
  - hga 13y ago
    A further testament to the quality of their effort, in that it's according to you a good match to their local technical base, we're pretty sure it scales up to the level needed for the state (intuitively and per the evidence), costs of licenses is I'm sure noise for the effort, etc. etc. Not necessarily to my taste either (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6627673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6627673), but if it gets the job done, who really cares?
    - keithwarren 13y ago
      Why do people still say stuff like 'cost of licenses'; the cost of licensing Windows Server for a system even at large scale (think StackOverflow) is so small it barely qualifies mention. Unless you are talking about licensing SQL Server per processor, the cost of licenses is unimportant.
      - hga 13y ago
        Well, seeing as how I like persistent data, as I'm sure this site does, SQL Server licenses would be a factor. But I was more thinking of the shoestring startup shooting initially for ramen profitability, where every unnecessary, can't instantly scale dollar spent is one too many. This is an effort with a serious budget, where today's back end costs of all sorts are I'm pretty a very small part of it all, probably even bandwidth.
interstitial 13y ago
Anyone paying attention to the news back in 2001? Remember when Sun and the other tech companies were offering all kinds of totalitarian tech solutions (like national IDs) to "solve" terrorism. Ah, how times change.
kitsune_ 13y ago
This is the website: https://kyenroll.ky.gov/ https://kyenroll.ky.gov/ If I follow a link from the home page, for instance, https://kyenroll.ky.gov/General/ContactUs https://kyenroll.ky.gov/General/ContactUs I can't use the back button any more.
- mountaineer 13y ago
  Among the hundreds of lines of javascript on the home page, I did see a block about disabling the back button. Their front-end work is certainly sub-par.
- efa 13y ago
  Small Business >> Lets Get Started >> Create an Account Get "Object moved to here". Seems like the most simple path has issues. Thought the "Object moved to here" link works.
  - efa 13y ago
    Doing some type of single sign on integration.
joemaller1 13y ago
For perspective, twice Kentucky's entire state population commutes into Manhattan every weekday. Scale matters.
- zerohm 13y ago
  Where are you getting these numbers? I get... Manhattan commuters = 1.6M Kentucky population = 4.38M [1] http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/more-people-commute-to-manhattan-than-any-other-county/?_r=0 http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/more-people-com... [2] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/21000.html http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/21000.html
  - 001sky 13y ago
    http://wagner.nyu.edu/files/rudincenter/ManhattanCommuting.pdf http://wagner.nyu.edu/files/rudincenter/ManhattanCommuting.p...
- Dylan16807 13y ago
  The users don't have to interact. If you can serve the first million people without problems, you can scale linearly to 100 million.
  - hga 13y ago
    That ignores the back ends to the back end. E.g. an IRS system that might be able to handle a million people with query/response transactions would almost certainly need different strategies to scale up 100 times.
    - Dylan16807 13y ago
      >That ignores the back ends to the back end. E.g. an IRS system Just make sure your component won't fail. Perhaps offer other departments help with sharding, be that consulting or paying for servers. Give a friendly error message that the other system has gone down, but your data is saved and will be resumed automatically upon next visit. Maybe retry later and email people when it succeeds. >an IRS system that might be able to handle a million people with query/response transactions would almost certainly need different strategies to scale up 100 times. I don't see why it would. Sort by name or SSN and do a roughly-even split across your servers.
viggity 13y ago
apparently it was built with ASPNET MVC http://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fkyenroll.ky.gov%2f http://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fkyenroll.ky.gov%2f
- rbanffy 13y ago
  Relevant headers: Server:Microsoft-IIS/8.0 X-AspNet-Version:4.0.30319 X-AspNetMvc-Version:4.0 X-Powered-By:ASP.NET
brianwawok 13y ago
Was anyone else sad when they saw 2 versions of jquery loading? But props to working vs pretty. Working + pretty is best, but working + ugly beats broken + pretty.
poxrud 13y ago
The website is very simple. Which means that it would not be a big deal to throw some media queries in and make it mobile friendly. This is 2013, I don't understand why rwd is still not applied everywhere.
- yeukhon 13y ago
  There is a good reason not to apply / do mobile version in the beginning. A lot of websites don't run properly on mobile browsers and the API support vary in different mobile browsers. Hence, it's a good idea to keep them for desktop. And a lot of people wanted to register for the health care will either consult with a specialist (running off a dell computer) or home computer. Not a tablet or your android phone.
MrZongle2 13y ago
"The country's best Obamacare website"? Isn't that like saying "the best Mexican restaurant in Montana"?
- hga 13y ago
  Feh, I'm sure Montana has some really good ones, and even "average" Mexican food tends to be quite good. More importantly, the right wing sources I read, like National Review Online (http://nationalreview.com/corner/361577/assessing-exchanges-yuval-levin http://nationalreview.com/corner/361577/assessing-exchanges-...) agree that their site works, along with those of Nevada, Colorado, and Washington state. I also give Hawaii and Oregon initial credit for not launching their sites on Oct 1 because they knew they weren't ready. That takes a level of moral courage we didn't see from those running the Healthcare.gov effort.
  - RandallBrown 13y ago
    Washington's didn't work for a few weeks after it was released. It also did things like send your password to you in plaintext.
semerda 13y ago
"SURESH PALDIA" likes to get his name into every block of JS code. Ref: https://kyenroll.ky.gov/Scripts/HBECommonUtility.js https://kyenroll.ky.gov/Scripts/HBECommonUtility.js Seems to be a common pattern with these gov websites or maybe the outsourcer. Bad quality code! Really really bad JS code chaining everything to the global prototype, hoisting issues indicate low comprehension about JS, no basic minification or cdn use et al.. awful. I hope they didn't spend in the millions to build that. Now if these folks could code well they would probably also build out unit tests. Thus reducing the need for manual labor testing the site, logic etc and launching faster.
- DougWebb 13y ago
  SURESH PALDIA: a) Shouldn't be so proud of himself, and b) Should learn to use Version Control, which does a fine job of keeping track of who wrote what.
- dopamean 13y ago
  I really don't understand these statements. I agree that the code isn't particularly elegant and violates some best practices but who else should have written it? I see so many comments be it here or Reddit or anywhere really from know it all criticizing work people have done. If it's so easy for it to have been done the way you say then why does it never seem to be done that way. It seems that the devs available to build these projects for the government aren't the best ones. The best ones must be at Facebook refactoring the Poke code.
  - ilyanep 13y ago
    > It seems that the devs available to build these projects for the government aren't the best ones. The best ones must be at Facebook refactoring the Poke code. There are lots of companies on Silicon Valley writing great code that are doing things a lot more important than Facebook pokes.
  - semerda 13y ago
    The reason you are seeing so many comments criticizing the work done on these government sites is due to the mountain of money spent on offshore outsourcing to deliver rubbish quality. A grad/junior software engineer in Silicon Valley could produce better quality code. Everyone is an expert until they have to deliver something!
brown9-2 13y ago
The important thing to note here is that a lot of states (but not all) that built their own exchanges are having similar success. Many states that decided to not build their own exchange, and thus saddled the federal government with another state to be responsible for, did so because they want the rollout to proceed poorly so that the law will fail.
oldgregg 13y ago
Political propaganda. Why is this on HN?
antidaily 13y ago
tl;dr -- all Flash.
drivingmissm 13y ago
It is very low bar to be the "best" site-- Kentucky has only enrolled 26,000 people in a state with over 4.3 million residents.
- keithwarren 13y ago
  Only around 5K were legit new enrolls, the rest were transplants from the state medicaid system
  - barake 13y ago
    That's much more relevant vs. comparing to the total population, since 640,000 people are without insurance in Kentucky [1]. [1] http://www.kentucky.com/2013/09/10/2814767/governor-encourages-kentuckians.html http://www.kentucky.com/2013/09/10/2814767/governor-encourag...
- hga 13y ago
  If they sent correct 834 EDI transactions (http://www.1edisource.com/learn-about-edi/transaction-sets/tset/834 http://www.1edisource.com/learn-about-edi/transaction-sets/t...) to the insurers they may well be ahead of Healthcare.gov.
meshko 13y ago
This is not apples to apples. I actually just went to the site and got a quote. The site works well and I don't want to diminish what they built, but I ended up getting quotes from like 3 different insurance companies. Compare that with dozens (if not hundreds) operating on the federal level.
- hga 13y ago
  What is the area like for the zipcode you supplied? As The New York Time has noted, in the Federal exchange the more rural areas have fewer providers and higher costs: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/business/health-law-fails-to-keep-prices-low-in-rural-areas.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/business/health-law-fails-...

97 points by scarmig 13y ago

A site that looks like garbage but works really well is much better than a site that looks good but doesn't work at all.

frandroid 13y ago
It has worked for Craigslist and eBay for a very long time...
- masklinn 13y ago
  And the early google.
jackfoxy 13y ago
Correctness is the dog. Everything else is tail. Don't know who said that first, might have been this guy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1lpKBMkgg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1lpKBMkgg
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
hga 13y ago
Hmmm, do you really think it looks like "garbage"? I'm a back end developer, don't claim to have much taste in these things, but it strikes me as simple and straightforward, maybe not pretty, but not ugly. And their images: tiny. Home page 32K, the one for individuals and families 26K. The old home page picture that used to be on Healthcare.gov is now gone, but I recall someone saying it, or another picture on the site, weighed in at 1.8M.
- gtaylor 13y ago
  As a fellow backend developer, this KY site doesn't look ugly to me. It looks minimal, seems to be pretty easy to get around, and seems to fulfill its purpose very well. It loads incredibly fast, and the text is all easy to understand. I'll take bland and functional over pretty and awkward any day when it's something this important to so many. Whoever did this for KY did a great job, IMO.
- bmelton 13y ago
  Not that my opinion matters at all, but I do think that it looks like garbage. That said, I agree that whether it looks like garbage or gold, all of that is secondary to whether or not it works correctly, and it seems to (not first-hand knowledge, nor am I a Kentucky resident.)
alayne 13y ago
It doesn't look like garbage to me https://kyenroll.ky.gov/ https://kyenroll.ky.gov/.

mathattack 13y ago

Forcing simplicity during design seems like a great way to avoid the complexity that takes over many larger projects. Too bad this couldn't be done nationally. I'm curious what the cost of this system was. Or perhaps more importantly, what's the cost per person that will ultimately be covered.

keithwarren 13y ago

3 month design, 3 month build, 3 month test Keep it simple. That was the philosophy. Don't bother reading the article, I just summed up the only info that wasn't just there to take up space. Disappointing that this was light on any real details like who the contractor was, or if it was done by state employees. What the integration story was? Technology? Staffing count? Budget? You know, all those things which would speak to 'How' Kentucky built the site.

keithwarren 13y ago
Just looked it up, running ASP.NET MVC 4. Not surprising, tech concentration is pretty regional and this part of the country is very heavily Microsoft focused.
- hga 13y ago
  A further testament to the quality of their effort, in that it's according to you a good match to their local technical base, we're pretty sure it scales up to the level needed for the state (intuitively and per the evidence), costs of licenses is I'm sure noise for the effort, etc. etc. Not necessarily to my taste either (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6627673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6627673), but if it gets the job done, who really cares?
  - keithwarren 13y ago
    Why do people still say stuff like 'cost of licenses'; the cost of licensing Windows Server for a system even at large scale (think StackOverflow) is so small it barely qualifies mention. Unless you are talking about licensing SQL Server per processor, the cost of licenses is unimportant.
    - hga 13y ago
      Well, seeing as how I like persistent data, as I'm sure this site does, SQL Server licenses would be a factor. But I was more thinking of the shoestring startup shooting initially for ramen profitability, where every unnecessary, can't instantly scale dollar spent is one too many. This is an effort with a serious budget, where today's back end costs of all sorts are I'm pretty a very small part of it all, probably even bandwidth.

interstitial 13y ago

Anyone paying attention to the news back in 2001? Remember when Sun and the other tech companies were offering all kinds of totalitarian tech solutions (like national IDs) to "solve" terrorism. Ah, how times change.

kitsune_ 13y ago

This is the website: https://kyenroll.ky.gov/ https://kyenroll.ky.gov/ If I follow a link from the home page, for instance, https://kyenroll.ky.gov/General/ContactUs https://kyenroll.ky.gov/General/ContactUs I can't use the back button any more.

mountaineer 13y ago
Among the hundreds of lines of javascript on the home page, I did see a block about disabling the back button. Their front-end work is certainly sub-par.
efa 13y ago
Small Business >> Lets Get Started >> Create an Account Get "Object moved to here". Seems like the most simple path has issues. Thought the "Object moved to here" link works.
- efa 13y ago
  Doing some type of single sign on integration.

joemaller1 13y ago

For perspective, twice Kentucky's entire state population commutes into Manhattan every weekday. Scale matters.

zerohm 13y ago
Where are you getting these numbers? I get... Manhattan commuters = 1.6M Kentucky population = 4.38M [1] http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/more-people-commute-to-manhattan-than-any-other-county/?_r=0 http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/more-people-com... [2] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/21000.html http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/21000.html
- 001sky 13y ago
  http://wagner.nyu.edu/files/rudincenter/ManhattanCommuting.pdf http://wagner.nyu.edu/files/rudincenter/ManhattanCommuting.p...
Dylan16807 13y ago
The users don't have to interact. If you can serve the first million people without problems, you can scale linearly to 100 million.
- hga 13y ago
  That ignores the back ends to the back end. E.g. an IRS system that might be able to handle a million people with query/response transactions would almost certainly need different strategies to scale up 100 times.
  - Dylan16807 13y ago
    >That ignores the back ends to the back end. E.g. an IRS system Just make sure your component won't fail. Perhaps offer other departments help with sharding, be that consulting or paying for servers. Give a friendly error message that the other system has gone down, but your data is saved and will be resumed automatically upon next visit. Maybe retry later and email people when it succeeds. >an IRS system that might be able to handle a million people with query/response transactions would almost certainly need different strategies to scale up 100 times. I don't see why it would. Sort by name or SSN and do a roughly-even split across your servers.

viggity 13y ago

apparently it was built with ASPNET MVC http://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fkyenroll.ky.gov%2f http://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fkyenroll.ky.gov%2f

rbanffy 13y ago
Relevant headers: Server:Microsoft-IIS/8.0 X-AspNet-Version:4.0.30319 X-AspNetMvc-Version:4.0 X-Powered-By:ASP.NET

brianwawok 13y ago

Was anyone else sad when they saw 2 versions of jquery loading? But props to working vs pretty. Working + pretty is best, but working + ugly beats broken + pretty.

poxrud 13y ago

The website is very simple. Which means that it would not be a big deal to throw some media queries in and make it mobile friendly. This is 2013, I don't understand why rwd is still not applied everywhere.

yeukhon 13y ago
There is a good reason not to apply / do mobile version in the beginning. A lot of websites don't run properly on mobile browsers and the API support vary in different mobile browsers. Hence, it's a good idea to keep them for desktop. And a lot of people wanted to register for the health care will either consult with a specialist (running off a dell computer) or home computer. Not a tablet or your android phone.

MrZongle2 13y ago

"The country's best Obamacare website"? Isn't that like saying "the best Mexican restaurant in Montana"?

hga 13y ago
Feh, I'm sure Montana has some really good ones, and even "average" Mexican food tends to be quite good. More importantly, the right wing sources I read, like National Review Online (http://nationalreview.com/corner/361577/assessing-exchanges-yuval-levin http://nationalreview.com/corner/361577/assessing-exchanges-...) agree that their site works, along with those of Nevada, Colorado, and Washington state. I also give Hawaii and Oregon initial credit for not launching their sites on Oct 1 because they knew they weren't ready. That takes a level of moral courage we didn't see from those running the Healthcare.gov effort.
- RandallBrown 13y ago
  Washington's didn't work for a few weeks after it was released. It also did things like send your password to you in plaintext.

semerda 13y ago

"SURESH PALDIA" likes to get his name into every block of JS code. Ref: https://kyenroll.ky.gov/Scripts/HBECommonUtility.js https://kyenroll.ky.gov/Scripts/HBECommonUtility.js Seems to be a common pattern with these gov websites or maybe the outsourcer. Bad quality code! Really really bad JS code chaining everything to the global prototype, hoisting issues indicate low comprehension about JS, no basic minification or cdn use et al.. awful. I hope they didn't spend in the millions to build that. Now if these folks could code well they would probably also build out unit tests. Thus reducing the need for manual labor testing the site, logic etc and launching faster.

DougWebb 13y ago
SURESH PALDIA: a) Shouldn't be so proud of himself, and b) Should learn to use Version Control, which does a fine job of keeping track of who wrote what.
dopamean 13y ago
I really don't understand these statements. I agree that the code isn't particularly elegant and violates some best practices but who else should have written it? I see so many comments be it here or Reddit or anywhere really from know it all criticizing work people have done. If it's so easy for it to have been done the way you say then why does it never seem to be done that way. It seems that the devs available to build these projects for the government aren't the best ones. The best ones must be at Facebook refactoring the Poke code.
- ilyanep 13y ago
  > It seems that the devs available to build these projects for the government aren't the best ones. The best ones must be at Facebook refactoring the Poke code. There are lots of companies on Silicon Valley writing great code that are doing things a lot more important than Facebook pokes.
- semerda 13y ago
  The reason you are seeing so many comments criticizing the work done on these government sites is due to the mountain of money spent on offshore outsourcing to deliver rubbish quality. A grad/junior software engineer in Silicon Valley could produce better quality code. Everyone is an expert until they have to deliver something!

brown9-2 13y ago

The important thing to note here is that a lot of states (but not all) that built their own exchanges are having similar success. Many states that decided to not build their own exchange, and thus saddled the federal government with another state to be responsible for, did so because they want the rollout to proceed poorly so that the law will fail.

oldgregg 13y ago

Political propaganda. Why is this on HN?

antidaily 13y ago

tl;dr -- all Flash.

drivingmissm 13y ago

It is very low bar to be the "best" site-- Kentucky has only enrolled 26,000 people in a state with over 4.3 million residents.

keithwarren 13y ago
Only around 5K were legit new enrolls, the rest were transplants from the state medicaid system
- barake 13y ago
  That's much more relevant vs. comparing to the total population, since 640,000 people are without insurance in Kentucky [1]. [1] http://www.kentucky.com/2013/09/10/2814767/governor-encourages-kentuckians.html http://www.kentucky.com/2013/09/10/2814767/governor-encourag...
hga 13y ago
If they sent correct 834 EDI transactions (http://www.1edisource.com/learn-about-edi/transaction-sets/tset/834 http://www.1edisource.com/learn-about-edi/transaction-sets/t...) to the insurers they may well be ahead of Healthcare.gov.

meshko 13y ago

This is not apples to apples. I actually just went to the site and got a quote. The site works well and I don't want to diminish what they built, but I ended up getting quotes from like 3 different insurance companies. Compare that with dozens (if not hundreds) operating on the federal level.

hga 13y ago
What is the area like for the zipcode you supplied? As The New York Time has noted, in the Federal exchange the more rural areas have fewer providers and higher costs: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/business/health-law-fails-to-keep-prices-low-in-rural-areas.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/business/health-law-fails-...