On Further Consideration

A few weeks ago, in a post titled Design 101 or Why Adding People to a Late Project Makes It Later, BRT discussed, in depth, why Healthcare.gov was a disaster from the get go but that it would be fixed ($630 million & counting) while the fools who built the system in the first place, would continue to get paid by us rubes rather then be fired and fined for gross incompetence, something that would have gone down in the private sector without question but won't because it's government and incompetence is a virtue as long as one has the right connections to the agency footing the bill, something all too sad to see as per the NYTimes article titled Inside the Race to Rescue a Health Care Site, and Obama.

Account creation was the province of Quality Software Services Inc., or QSSI, a company based in Columbia, Md. Its subcontractor, Oracle, flew a high-level team of software engineers to Washington. Experts disagree on what went wrong. But several said that errors in the software code written to stitch the Oracle product into the online system and improperly configured hardware trapped users in endless technological loops. It would take eight days to resolve just that one bottleneck.

In Herndon, as engineers tried to come to grips with repeated crashes, a host of problems were becoming apparent: inadequate capacity in its data center and sloppy computer code, partly the result of rushed work amid the rapidly changing specifications issued by the government.

The website had barely been tested before it went live, so a large number of software and hardware defects had not been uncovered. Fixing the account creation software simply exposed other problems; people still could not register to buy insurance. A system intended to handle 50,000 simultaneous users was fundamentally unstable, unable to handle even a tiny fraction of that. As few as 500 users crippled it, according to people involved.

Relations between the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and its prime contractor, CGI Federal, had soured over the summer, well before the website opened on Oct. 1. Contractors responsible for different parts of the portal barely talked to one another, hoping to avoid blame. Among the contractors, rumors were swirling: CGI Federal would be fired. IBM, one of the losing bidders, would take over. The system would be scrapped; it had to be rebuilt from scratch.

Best of all...

Mr. Zients decided the site needed a “systems integrator,” a single company that would take charge. On Oct. 24, Ms. Tavenner put Quality Software Services in that new role — a move that, people familiar with the project say, began to resolve conflicting and contradictory directions from her agency.

Simply unreal. Gee, what an innovative approach, something Fred Brooks discussed, in great length, in Mythical Man Month, as to why a visionary system architect is ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED if any complex project is to succeed and... said visionary must be in place, prior to doing anything of significance, or said project will fail, a prerequisite totally ignored in the disastrous HC.Gov roll out in Oct, 2013. 

Note that even when healthcare.gov becomes capable, the much larger problem of HC itself has not been addressed as this slow motion catastrophe continues to run amuck, something only Single Payer can solve but you already knew that, right?

Factoid: Click on the graphic to find out what states actually allow insurance renewals pre & post Obama.