Karl M.

Where does sinecure end, and communism begin?

https://nppes.cms.hhs.gov/NPPES must have been written by some communists whose pay and employment has no correlation with performance, or perhaps some good ol' government contractors, who hired cheap-as-possible freshmen programmers who wrote this site 10 years ago and haven't updated it since.

I have received the following errors from their website on a dozen occasions during the last hour and have had to resubmit my application as many times, and there is no end in sight. (That's resubmission of application starting from page 1, of course -- there's evidently no such thing as caching or saving input for the application while it's being filled out). Add that their call center is not open on Sundays.

Note that I am running the latest update of Safari / Yosemite on a brand-new system.

"Safari can't open the page https://nppes.cms.hhs.gov/NPPES/________ because the server unexpectedly dropped the connection. This sometimes occurs when the server is busy. Wait a few minutes, and then try again."

"NPPES has detected a potential risk to sensitive information in this browser session. Your NPPES session has been terminated to protect the data in NPPES.
For the protection of your NPPES data, please close this browser.
[...]

"Some browsers share sessions regardless of how the browser is opened. Please check with the browser's vendor about session management. When NPPES detects multiple browsers open within the same session, NPPES will terminate the session to protect the data in NPPES. Data entered will be lost and will need to be re-entered."

When I try to reload, it detects this security problem: they think that I'm creating multiple connections to their server (probably because they made me restart the session), so they shut down and make me restart.

I've never received such "security" concerns from a website like Google. If you know how to write secure websites, you don't need to put the onus on the customer (especially when I did nothing to jeopardize security).

They have a monopoly on large swaths of healthcare, by force of law, and so they don't mind creating the world's worst website ever. The Obamacare website healthcare.gov didn't work until it was a matter of national outrage. This is the same song, different verse, but this won't make the news; doesn't directly affect quite enough people.