Can the “Best and the Brightest” Fix HealthCare.gov?
HealthCare.gov is monstrously complex. The Times reports that there’s more than 500 million lines of code — of which more than 5 million lines may need to be rewritten. And that code is interfacing with computer systems (and computer code) at the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, state Medicaid systems, insurers like Aetna, and more. Even the best programmers would have trouble figuring out what’s going on — much less what’s going wrong — quickly. (Ezra Klein)
“500 million lines of code”
I wonder how many tweets that is?
“HealthCare.gov is monstrously complex.”
And the award for understatement of the decade goes to Ezra Klein!
That’s the definition of a programming nightmare.
“The Times reports that there’s more than 500 million lines of code — of which more than 5 million lines may need to be rewritten.”
Is that a lot? How does it compare to similar private websites?
It’s a lot, considering that an error can exist merely in comma placement somewhere in the middle of those lines. Adding in having to interface with other government sites, and its enough to make you want to cry.
It would be easier to fix if Republicans would stop stonewalling everything, and hadn’t stonewalled in the first place.
So, Republican political opposition is responsible for inept programming? Sounds reasonable.
I bet Stewie also believes that Republican opposition caused 9/11 and Pearl Harbor.
Probably. What isn’t the Republicans fault, Stewart?
If Republicans hadn’t been isolationists then we could have intervened against Japan before Pearl Harbor, and our policies would have brought peace to the Middle East instead of propping up dictators like the Shah of Iran.
You’re a war hawk Stewart?
If Republicans hadn’t stood in the way then they could have gotten the best programmers instead of fulfilling Republican’s fevered dream of austerity.
So, we’ll have the best programmers on healthcare.gov, taking them away from all of the important things they are doing that are actually successful and valuable.
Making sure people have health insurance and don’t die is more valuable than making some CEO a few more dollars.
You don’t think that programmers are working on really important things? Streamlining cancer research? Contributing to the reduction of the homeless population? Even the largely frivolous things that simply make us more connected help foster understanding between cultures.
So you don’t think making sure people have access to healthcare is important?
It is, but ObamaCare isn’t the way. The best programmers would be wasting their time on an ill conceived program.
Program as in public initiative, not computer program.
Wow, Ezra is really critical of the law. That’s kind of surprising.
The government doesn’t have any of the best and brightest.
Considering that a group of the “best and brightest” lead us into the Vietnam Ware, that’s not phrase that people should be using.
If they had any of the best and brightest in the first place we wouldn’t be here.
I disagree. There are some very smart people that work in government. Unfortunately the lack of an effective profit and loss system in government causes inefficiency and ineptitude.
You’re defending government? Careful now, that’s a primrose path with blackberries at the end if I’ve ever seen one.
My question is why didn’t they have the brightest and best working on this to begin with?
Because those people are more valuable elsewhere.
Well I guess that tells you what kind of priority this was.
I think the real question is not whether the new guys are better and smarter than the old guys, or how many lines of code have to be re-written. Rather, it is that the incentives facing the new guys are even worse than the incentives that faced the old guys.
It’s not like a business that launched a new IT project that fails. In that case, they can shut it down, sell it to someone else who can do it better, or put it on ice until they figure out what to do better.
In this case, money is no object. The Administration cannot pause the roll out. So, the new guys have an incentive to charge top dollar and hold up the Administration at the last minute. Plus, they can blame the old guys for the problem.
The scene: Kathleen Sebelius’ New Year’s Eve party, December 31, 2013. She receives a special visitor: “I am very sorry Madam Secretary, but the system was infinitely worse than we thought when you recruited us to fix this mess. We had no idea that it could be so bad. We tried our best over the ten weeks. But for us to have this fixed before the end of March we will need [fill in the blank] more dollars. And we don’t have time for all that competitive bidding bureaucracy.”
on c-span.org there is a line that say you have no safe acc at all at any time on this web page at healthcare.org and they are passing the blame and some of the judges get mad and they to me need to shut it down for good