The saga of healthcare.gov has been a symphony of government inefficiency. The effort, directly overseen by the IT department of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, involved no fewer than 55 contractors. The process was thick with lawyers and political interference. In violation of current best practices in the software world, the code was kept almost entirely secret; other engineers weren’t able to point out its flaws, and it wasn’t tested rigorously enough. The Obama administration has been assailed for not calling in Silicon Valley’s top minds to collaborate, but that misses the fundamental problem: The best coders in the Valley would’ve never agreed to work under such deadening, unpleasant conditions.
But, but, but... isn't there someone in charge who could have said, let's involve fewer contractors, and get the lawyers and bureaucrats and politicans out of the process, and publish the code so that people could comment on it, and make sure we have six months or a year to do beta testing on it, and make sure that we have the appropriate personnel and expertise to do it, etc.? Isn't there a position that is supposed to be doing that kind of, well, shall we say... executive management?
Oh, yeah...
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