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Published October 22, 2013

By Gary Pearce - Talking About Politics Blog

For a year we’ve heard how the digital geniuses in the Obama campaign demolished Mitt Romney. Now they can’t make the website work for the biggest thing in his administration?

This might say something about the difference between campaigns and governing – or between the private sector and the public sector. Government IT programs are notoriously subject to technical disasters. Witness NC TRACKS, NC FAST and the college application process. Even Facebook fell on its face yesterday.

But this is still bad news for the President. And, with the shutdown behind us, it’s big news.

Obama is reduced to attacking his own people. His defenders resort to: “Obamacare is a lot better than the website.”

Unfortunately in today’s world, if your website sucks, people assume your whole operation sucks. Especially the young people Obamacare targets to buy health insurance.

Republicans got burned by the shutdown. So now they’ll turn up the heat.

What an irony if technological incompetence causes the most tech-savvy administration in history to bungle its biggest achievement.

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October 22, 2013 at 9:51 am
TP Wohlford says:

*SOME* of us opposed Obamacare for valid reasons, for situations which we could foresee and have come to pass.

I'm an IT guy who has worked projects for governments. In fact, I am unemployed due to my project being cancelled by a NC dept when a huge project -- not unlike the Obamacare web page in its ambition -- went overtime, meaning I couldn't do what I needed to do before "busy season."

Any IT person could've seen this one coming. The massive databases and web pages and security procedures that had to be put into place were daunting enough to a Research Triangle company, but totally out of the question in the time allotted in a Federal Gov't environment. To go from a concept (Obama's "My Plan") to a bill (still a concept) to procurement and contract negotiations to hiring talent in a Federal gov't situation alone would've taken a full year. Word on the IT street months ago said that these programs -- the Individual Mandate page is just one such projects -- were still buying servers in late spring, and were not gonna make the deadlines.

Worse yet - as any programmer knows, the worst thing that happens are things like "scope creep" ("Can we just add this one little feature?") and a confused chaotic process. And in this case, both happened due to the fact that HHS was still trying to figure out what Congress said, let alone how to do it.

Indeed, those of us who lived through the HIPAA implantation a few years ago -- a project much smaller and much less "revolutionary" that Obamacare -- could pretty much figure this would happen.

So yes -- Some of us said, "Hey, if you try to take over 4% of the World Economy, something the size of the old Soviet centrally-planned economy, you are probably gonna have your hands full, and failure is almost guaranteed." And the IT problems are just the part that is showing.