A Site as Bad as the Bad Loans

The federal Health and Human Services Department had a good idea. It posted on the Internet a list of deadbeat doctors who “repeatedly ignored” government efforts to collect on their student loans. The point was to raise the shame factor and possibly cause a loss of patients, thereby putting a price on dodging repayment.

So far so good. This kind of thing has worked with parents who won’t pay child support. Why not with doctors? Although identification of student loan defaulters generally is prohibited by federal privacy laws, that protection was removed by Congress for recipients of so-called health education assistance loans.

The problem is that the HHS has followed some other federal departments in inviting visitors before its digital house was in order. First, it’s difficult for Internet users to get a modem connection to the HHS site. Then there is the bandwidth problem. You can think of bandwidth as the square footage of your residence--the more you have, the more guests you can accommodate at one time. The HHS site has the bandwidth of a studio apartment, so very few people can get in at the same time and those who do are confronted with a glacial pace: On Friday morning it took more than an hour to get through the Web site’s information.

Also, the site’s cross-referencing was defective. The “defaulted borrowers by school” list was supposed to include names and type of medical practice. It didn’t. Not even the government press release on the Internet listing was available.

Information was sometimes outdated, and the site was wrong about the amount owed by at least one doctor. How loudly can you yell “Lawsuit!”?

One just doesn’t unveil a site like this until it is fully operational and has been checked repeatedly for errors. Chalk up the HHS as another federal department that seems ill-prepared for the Information Age.