Nancy Benac and Jennifer Agiesta for the AP:
The debut of the government’s health insurance marketplaces drew a huge audience — and underwhelming reviews.
Here’s Adrianne Jeffries at The Verge:
Government contracts are usually awarded to the lowest bidder, and the disincentives for not delivering aren’t very strong. There are also a number of extra requirements for government contracts that made state-of-the-art, Silicon Valley-style development impossible for this scale of government project. For example, contractors that worked on the Healthcare.gov backend were probably required to have Federal Information Security Management Act certification, which rules out the smaller, more agile firms that could have brought a more innovative sensibility to the project.
Sigh.