Obama Calls on Private Sector IT Pros to fix HealthCare.gov

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While the US is just now beginning to recover from a two-week long political standoff over President Obama’s health care reform measures, some people have been filing complaints about the HealthCare.gov website relating to significant technical issues.

Earlier on Monday, President Obama said that the US is tapping IT talent from all over the country to fix the myriad of problems behind the health insurance exchange site. 

"The Web site that's supposed to make it easy to apply for and purchase the insurance is not working the way it should for everybody… People have been stuck during the application process.” Obama proclaimed, “We are doing everything we can possibly do to get the Web site working better, faster, sooner… Experts from some of America's top private-sector tech companies, who have seen things like this happen before, are reaching out and offering to send help.”

In the mean-time, President Obama said that potential insurance buyers could sign up for health care by phone or in-person.

63 Comments Comment from the forums
  • none12345
    Go call one of the major MMORPG players. They know a thing or two about scalable hardware.

    The fact that they have already spent 400 million on that joke of a site, is beyond sad at this point.

    Some of the major game players probably could have done the entire thing for 30 million instead of 400 million, and it would probably work just fine(with perhaps the exception of day 1 congestion). As long as its not EA anyway; recent history has taught us they probably couldn't have done it any better, lol.
    Reply
  • mjw
    They should just junk what was built, copy the California website which works fine, change the branding here and there from California to Federal, and deploy it - problem solved!
    Reply
  • bigshootr8
    @MJW that doesn't account for the web traffic that a site receives on a National level. But I do agree to a certain extent if its not working maybe a re work should be done.
    Reply
  • bigshootr8
    @MJW that doesn't account for the web traffic that a site receives on a National level. But I do agree to a certain extent if its not working maybe a re work should be done.
    Reply
  • jayracer7474
    this was made to fail and that has been the point the whole time, whats worse than the site is the health coverage you get when you sign up
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  • SteelCity1981
    So he wants people to fix a website for a broken healthcare system he implemented. irony.
    Reply
  • jhansonxi
    Part of the problem are the regulations which control government procurement. They practically guarantee failure. The fact that the site functioned at all makes it look good compared to past IT projects of the FBI and IRS.
    Reply
  • leoscott
    bigshootr8, Maybe if they had gone to the right people at first, US citizens instead of Canada, they may have found someone who could deal with the scalability problem. I'm sure people on this sight could name at least 10 companies who get more hits a day on their websites than healthcare.gov has had since it's release. Google, Facebook, eBay, Amazon, Microsoft, YouTube, Yahoo, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Twitter. We have people who know how to do this but the administration needs to buy a raffle ticket for a tractor. Then they can tie a chain to it and pull their head out. With this level of planning the future might not be bright.
    Reply
  • bigshootr8
    @leoscott while I'm not in favor of the bill I completely agree with you why not work with big companies like google, microsoft and amazon to get a site like that working correctly. I just feel in a lot of ways the government will always be technology challenged.
    Reply
  • COLGeek
    Obama Calls on Private Sector IT Pros to fix HealthCare.gov...because that is who the government hires to do such work.

    I think it fair to say, that this is the largest public-interest web presence that the US has ever undertaken. It is also fair to say that V1 was beta released a tad bit early. It will get better.
    Reply