You can tell that it’s bad for the Obamacare exchanges. No, not because more people are ripping it apart*…
Bugs can be fixed. Systems can even be rearchitected remarkably quickly. So nothing currently the matter with healthcare.gov is fatal. But the ability to fix it will be affected by organizational and communication structures.
…or that they’re forced to come up solutions that are politically infeasible**:
People are no doubt scrambling to get healthcare.gov into some semblance of working condition; the fastest way would be to appoint a person with impeccable engineering and site delivery credentials to a government position. Give this person wide authority to assign work and reshuffle people across the entire project and all contractors, and keep his schedule clean. If you found the right person—often called the “schedule asshole” on large software projects—things will come together quickly. Sufficient public pressure will result in things getting fixed, but the underlying problems will most likely remain, due to the ossified corporatist structure of governmental contracts.
No, you know that it’s bad when Slate references George W Bush without visibly sneering. Continue reading Yet another post on the structural problems of #Obamacare (Language warning).