Healthcare.gov is a complete failure

[BluegrassStateBlues]

As an apology to early users of Grand Theft Auto V's online mode, Rockstar Games on Friday announced plans to give all its online players $500,000 in in-game currency.

The "stimulus package" comes as a response to myriad technical issues many players faced when attempting to use the video game title's online mode, which is a first for the series.

"For players who experienced cloud server errors, connection issues, and lost game progress and characters in these first days of GTA Online, we hope this GTA$ helps to facilitate a fresh start or makes your continued life in Los Santos and Blaine County extra sweet," Rockstar said in a blog post.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10797_3-57607134-235/rockstar-to-dole-out-$500k-stimulus-to-gta-v-online-users/?ttag=fbwp

Wherever the fine line is between combating piracy and user experience, Electronic Arts crossed it with a trouble-plagued launch of the new SimCity game this week.

Nearly three days after the public debut of the Maxis city-building game for PC, users around the world were still regularly unable to log onto EA servers to play it. Frustrated gamers were receiving various error messages indicating servers weren’t available or login was closed.

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2013/03/08/new-simcity-a-failure-to-launch/

The update to iOS 7 has not been smooth sailing for all.

Many users on Twitter, as well as on Apple's support site are reporting issues when attempting to install the update, which went out earlier today.

Affected users are reporting that the downloads will stop, with a warning error pop-up that says the "software update failed." Others are saying they cannot connect to the iTunes Store to update apps.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57603512-37/ios-7-upgraders-reporting-installation-itunes-issues/

Oh, and a bit of nostalgia for Twitter users:

[dkf]

1. iOS 7 adoption rate passes 60% a week after launch

If it seems like everyone you know with an iPhone has already updated to iOS 7, that’s because almost everyone has. Mixpanel began tracking the iOS 7 adoption rate after the software update went live last week, and reported that the update quickly made its way into 29% of iPhones. Over the weekend, iOS 7 had been downloaded by more than 50% of iPhone owners, and on Thursday the adoption rate had reached 60%. Fiksu’s tracking service reports similar numbers, currently sitting at just under a 59% adoption rate. Fiksu has also charted iOS 7 usage relative to previous iOS updates, and the trend shows that iOS 7 is still way ahead of the curve. Check out Mixpanel‘s chart below.

http://news.yahoo.com/ios-7-adoption-rate-passes-60-week-launch-233050807.html

[Drunken Irishman]

2. I remember plopping down over $50 on the new SimCity...

And couldn't sign on to even play the game for the first couple weeks. Worse, it would randomly knock you out of it and there was nothing you could do since the game was entirely online.

It happens. It hasn't even been two weeks yet. The website is working much better today than it was this time last week.

[ProSense]

3. There have been comparisons to Medicare Part D implementation, but

an even better comparison is to MA health care.

Why It Doesn't Matter If People Aren't Signing Up for Obamacare Yet

—By Stephanie Mencimer

Republicans have been insisting for a week now that Obamacare is a failure because immediately following its official debut on October 1, few people actually signed up for subsidized insurance plans through its new health exchanges. "Error message after error message. Failed security standards and 60 hours on website hold for just this one Kansan. It is clear, Obamacare is failing — an embarrassment, particularly for the former Kansas governor who is now in charge of Obamacare," Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.) complained on the House floor last week.

<...>

What happened in Massachusetts is pretty much exactly what's happening right now with Obamacare. After the law went into effect in Massachusetts, state offices were totally overwhelmed by the number of people clamoring to sign up for insurance, or what the state's Medicaid director dubbed the "stress of success." Lost paperwork, computer glitches, confusion over who was eligible for what, and not enough staff to handle the workload meant that in those early days, consumers could wait several months after submitting an application to finally get coverage. So many people were trying to enroll in the expanded Medicaid program that the Medicaid agency ended up with a months-long backlog of applications. In the first two months, only 18,000 of more than 200,000 potentially eligible people had successfully signed up through the connector, according to Jonathan Gruber, an MIT professor who helped design the Massachusetts system and served on the Connector board. And all of that happened in a state with only 300,000 or so eligible applicants and without a well-funded opposition trying to derail the law at every turn.

But guess what? Eventually the kinks got worked out and people got covered. Enrollment opened in October 2006, and by the deadline for getting mandatory coverage, July 1, 2007, the Boston Globe reported, 20,000 more people had signed up for insurance on the exchange than the state had expected—12,000 of them in just the two weeks before the deadline. Total enrollment went from 18,000 in December 2006 to 158,000 a year later, says Gruber. Today, Massachusetts has the lowest rate of uninsured residents in the entire country—less than 4 percent—and polls show that people are generally happy with how everything worked out. The conservative Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation has called the state's health care reform law “a well thought-out piece of legislation.”

The federal exchange is fielding vastly more work than the Massachusetts Health Connector, and if it's having trouble with the workload, that's largely thanks to Republican opponents. The drafters of the ACA never envisioned the federal government running health care marketplaces for most of the country. The ACA was specifically designed to respect the state's rights that Republicans claim to care so much about. It empowered states, which already regulate the sale of insurance, to run the exchanges. Healthcare.gov was supposed to be a backstop for states either too small to run their own or that dropped the ball on setting up their own exchanges. Instead, Republican governors across the country, and mostly in the South, abdicated the job completely. So instead of running a marketplace for a couple of states as planned, Healthcare.gov is having to do the work of 70 percent of them, including big states like Florida, Texas and Virginia (and also, ahem, Kansas). Of course the site was going to have some problems!

- more -

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/10/it-doesnt-matter-if-no-one-signs-obamacare-week

Now multiply that by the number of states being catered to. Still, it all worked out.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023818383#post11