Obamacare website

Yeah, it’s a piece of shit. I haven’t been able to get past the security screen yet, it keeps crashing. But it’s not a bad thing that so many people are trying to get through, since Republican Heroes of the Shutdown keep insisting everyone hates Obamacare.

Anybody get through yet?

“A couple of weeks ago, Apple rolled out a new mobile operating system, and within days, they found a glitch, so they fixed it,” Obama said. “I don’t remember anybody suggesting Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads or threatening to shut down the company if they didn’t.”

But the Obama administration doesn’t have a basically working product that would be improved by a software update. They have a web site that almost nobody has been able to successfully use. If Apple launched a major new product that functioned as badly as Obamacare’s online insurance marketplace, the tech world would be calling for Tim Cook’s head.

The good news for Obamacare is that lots of people want to sign up. Lots and lots of people. Many more, in fact, than anyone expected. The bad news is that the Obama administration’s online insurance marketplace — which serves 34 states — can’t handle the success.

“The amount of demand is really driving the issues,” a senior administration official told me. “But we’re adding capacity every hour.”

Yes, the overwhelming crush of traffic is behind many of the web site’s failures. But the web site was clearly far, far from prepared for traffic at anywhere near these levels. That’s a planning flaw: The Obama administration badly underestimated the level of interest. The fact that the traffic is good news for the law doesn’t obviate the fact that the site’s inability to absorb that traffic is bad news for the law.

Part of the problem, according to a number of designers, is that the site is badly coded, which makes the traffic problems more acute. There’s a darkly amusing thread on Reddit where web designers are picking through the site’s code and mocking it mercilessly. “They’re loading 11 CSS files and 62 (wat?) JavaScript files on each page, uncompressed and without expires headers,” writes Spektr44. “They have blocks of HTML inexplicably wrapped in script tags. Wtf?”

Some of the problems on the site don’t require any particular coding experience to identify. While the design is clean and clear, the instructions can be confusing. For instance, when you choose your username, the site says: “The username is case sensitive. Choose a username that is 6-74 characters long and must contain a lowercase or capital letter, a number, or one of these symbols _.@/-.”

Making matters worse, the warning that your username doesn’t comply disappears when you click your cursor in the password field, rather than when you type in a conforming username. (At least for me. Though three screens after that, the site crashed on me entirely.)

No one knows how many people have actually signed up through the federal exchanges. As of Thursday morning, health-care reporters were desperately trying to find even one. Eventually, Chad Henderson was of Georgia was located. He was subsequently interviewed by pretty much every news organization in the country. According to his Facebook page, he was also asked to be on a conference call put on by the Department of Health and Human Services, which suggests that they’re not exactly overwhelmed with successful applicants to trot out before the press.

While we can’t know for sure, it’s possible and even likely that the number of visitors who are actually being able to sign up for insurance is quite low.

Republicans who decided to shut down the government this week rather than relentlessly message against the Affordable Care Act’s glitches did the law a great favor. The site’s flaws are real — and if there was more focus on them, they’d be quite embarrassing.