So, in case you missed it (because who doesn't love up-to-the-minute updates about the healthcare?) Healthcare.gov launched recently and Barack Obama (by the way, have you ever Googled "Obamacare"? It's scary-- see one of my favorites above).
Apparently there's been mixed results in terms of how effective the healthcare.gov website has been, from some people saying that 130K people have signed up for healthcare, to people saying that unique visitors declined from 15M to 4M in the first two weeks due to poor website performance. The real numbers are probably lower than that, even though some states are definitely farther ahead than others. Obama has been quoted saying that "nobody's madder than me" about the failures of the website. I do like this article from BusinessWeek though about the allocation of money to develop this site. The site cost $394M, of which, $88M went to a Canadian development firm called CGI. However, it seems wrong to blame it all on the developers. Anyone who has ever worked with the government can attest that most of the repositories, data sources and tools are laughably outdated and impossible to work with.
Overall, it seems like it was just a failure in expectation setting. After weeks of folks claiming that this was going to modernize healthcare and the high price tag, having glitchy back end systems are a huge let down-- especially for an administration that, at first glance, seemed to truly understand technology and how to connect people in effective ways. I have no doubt that they have an inordinate amount of people working on it now, but it may be too little too late.
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