Dev.SN

How Minnesota's Health Exchange Became an IT Disaster

posted by girlwhowaspluggedout on Thursday March 13 2014, @09:30PM   
from the lowest-bidders-all-the-way-down dept.

skullz writes:

"I've watched the Affordable Care Act's federal and state website roll-outs with trepidation as one botched IT project crashes and burns after another. As more information is coming out about Minnesota's health insurance exchange, lo and behold, poor communication, lack of fundamentals, and bureaucracy seem to be contributing factors.

From NPR's How A Series Of Mistakes Hobbled Minnesota's Health Exchange we learn that the users were the first to actually test the website:

What Minnesotans did not know is they were testing the site. There wasn't time for consumer testing before the site went live. Michael Krigsman, a consultant who specializes in diagnosing and preventing IT project failures, says testing is key. 'That is so screwed up. You can quote me on that,' he says. 'This is one of these things that's so foundational. It's like why do we need to breathe the air?"

Propublica has another article which covers the health insurance exchanges of Minnesota, Massachusetts, Oregon and Maryland - blue states that support the Affordable Care Act.

Having been on projects with shifting scope, compressed timeframes, and arbitrary milestones I feel for the developers who worked on these websites and am a little depressed that we are still doing this in 2014. When will the managers learn? Or at least listen?"

• Re:Insanity layred on top of insanity. (Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Friday March 14 2014, @11:03AM

  by Thexalon (636) on Friday March 14 2014, @11:03AM (#16416) Homepage

  then outsource (inexplicably on a cost-plus contract) the entire implementation, as if turning over a government mandated diktat entirely to a for-profit entity will not be squeezed for every dime its worth

  Whaddaya mean, "inexplicably"? The explanation is clear: The point of the exercise is to transfer as much government money as possible to certain favored businesses. The more that politicians or bureaucrats can do that, the more valuable it is to bribe them, which means they can demand larger bribes.

  That's why I'm thoroughly opposed to the concept of government contracts: They are inevitably and almost invariably corrupt. I'd rather have our government just hire people directly to do the jobs that the government has decided it needs to do. There's no real reason to hire a business - all that does is creates at least one more management team and a batch of middlemen that get paid handsomely while contributing more-or-less nothing of value.

  --
  Every task is easy if somebody else is doing it.

  Parent

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