Introduction

Healthcare.gov is a website which was designed for the people to get insurance for themselves. The government of federal United States operates it. It is passed under the act of Patient Protection and affordable Care act which is most probably known as the Obama care. The goal behind the launch of this website was to serve as an online portal for the Obama’s act. The main goal of the government was to provide insurance to people with the subsidized rates and it had a vision to provide insurance to the maximum number of people. The website was a place to get Healthcare insurance at a very minimized rate for the people who have low incomes less than four time the poverty line. The research by the government shows that there are 48 Million people who are uninsured. The Exchange was started on October 1 2013 and the target was to provide insurance to all the 48 Million. The Website was designed in such a way that use to help people shop different insurance plans and to check the eligibility for the subsidized rates of healthcare.

The Reason for the Crisis The plan was ready and launched on the date same as promised on 1st October 2013. But after the launch the website had many problems. As soon as the website was launched with no time it was crashed. The server was too slow and was not able to connect the website. The site was made with he perspective of 50000 to 60000 people visiting it in a day but the no reached to 2.2million.The customer service provider were inadequate in providing the proper knowledge and information to the customers. The website was having multiple technical issues on the first day of the launch and could not support the increasing no of people visiting the website. Only about 10% to 20% people were able to login and create their account on the site. The people were also facing difficulties in signing up. Most of the people were visiting at the same time and the site was responding with the errors. “In the first week, only 1% of the estimated 3.7 million people who tried to register actually enrolled in a plan.” as per the article Baltopedia.org. The data was not transferred properly with the respective guidance o the healthcare providers. This is what happened with the website after the launch and it led to the failure of the project. It was the one of the major crises in the terms of the big industries and a predictable type of crisis.

The management of Crisis is as follows.
As an individual Obama managed the crisis is very well. It was managed by taking the proper and efficient steps. He accepted the problem of the website crash. Immediately the team working on the website was assigned to solve the problem and the implementation of software was started. The best it expert from both inside and outside the government was appointed to improve the working of the project. There was a 24/7 team working to boost the capacity of the website and fix the problem.The company after the research found different ways to apply to the situation. The call center now had more staff to process the application of the people and they started a help webpage for peole to learn the ways to enroll in the plan. Before the implementation people had to sign up tif they wanted to have a look to checkout the different plans and now they have designed the software in a such a way that people can check prices and compare insurances and after they are interested and then sign up. They updated the site several times and tried to fix the bug issues by writing more and more software codes. They went step by step the with the problems such as the first one was the waiting room for the people which was the sign up and logging in the website. They were installing different tools and processes and trying to aggressively monitor like where are the people finding the errors and trying to fix them up. The crisis team is defining new test process to prevent the issues sand deploying the fixes.

In my point of view there was the quick and early action that was the best part of handling the crisis. President Obama made it a point to solve the problem at the earliest. But it would have been more better if he would have divided the work in different teams. He could have given the work to different IT companies to handle the situation. The crisis would have handled better if there would be some specific time deadlines to complete the issues. The best outcome would be shut the website and fix all the bugs and issues related to it and start it all again.
Rather than working side by side and running the website parallel the overall management of the crisis was positively managed as they were going through the proper steps by starting with the sign up problems and going to the other problems of the website.

In my recommendation They should have had a back-up plan in place and jumped into action. Like the fireman who has drilled and trained for a variety of emergencies, there should have been several SWAT teams leaping into action.