You can't afford to screw up your signature accomplishment. And yet that's what the Obama administration seems to have done with the botched launch of HealthCare.gov.
After all of the overheated debates, the midnight votes and Supreme Court skirmishes, the long-anticipated October 1 ObamaCare debut has been a rolling disaster. This is not partisan spin but a matter of consensus, from the president's supporters to his most obsessive critics.
The problem lies in a website that seems more brick and mortar than terabytes. – slow-moving, complicated and badly coded. This technological leviathan was developed in large part by a Canadian government contracting firm called CGI, apparently lacking the agility of the tech-savvy activists who drove President Barack Obama's two presidential campaigns into the history books.
At a cumulative cost of roughly $300 million (£185 million) taxpayer dollars, excuses ring hollow. But the problems seem to have stemmed from a combination of sclerotic procurement rules and civil service regulations that hamstrung the development process so much that even rank amateurs spending more than five minutes on the site now dismiss it as not ready for prime time. » | John Avlon | Saturday, October 26, 2013
