On the failure of Healthcare.gov →

Adrianne Jeffries at The Verge:

More than 55 companies worked on Healthcare.gov and its state counterparts. It’s difficult to tell exactly who worked on what, but the contractors that worked on technical aspects of the site are Beltway regulars.

Noticeably missing from the list are companies with a reputation for excellence in technology.

Without a doubt, the rollout of Healthcare.gov was a clusterfuck.

I work for a web shop. I know websites can be difficult to build — feature scope can creep, designs can go sideways and clients can get grumpy. That said, I think any one of the many Internet giants that call America home — Amazon, Facebook or Google to name a few — could have done a much better job than the jumble of contractors who were awarded the work.

(Granted, maybe Oracle should be left off the list.)

There are lots of reasons the website struggled, but the main one is this: the federal government sucks at purchasing things. Thanks to federally-mandated Indefinite-Delivery Contracts, companies who have no business building complex websites end up with that exact task, and farm it out to companies who are in over their heads with such work.

While it is the government’s fault that Healthcare.gov sucked at launch, there’s not much the White House could have done differently. Federal procurement are complex and deep-rooted.

Republicans have pointed to the website’s failure as a sign or reason that the Affordable Healthcare Act should be repealed.

That — of course — is a hilariously childish response. It’s akin to saying I want to move my family out of our neighborhood because I don’t like the color of my neighbor’s new car. It’s a massive overreaction.

Instead of trying to repeal the law, if the government should be spending time revisiting how it purchases and deals with IT. If that can’t happen, more than just healthcare will suffer in the future.