Troubled Obamacare website wasn't tested until a week before launch

As for how it could be better, as I said about, accountability.

Let's take a recent partial example: when George H. W. Bush became president, he immediately got rid of every "Reaganite" in the politically appointed/staff/whatever parts that a president has control over.

And the nation didn't like the results and fired his ass in the next election.

He's proposed a necessary tactic, mass(ive) firings, which I agree 100% with, but he hasn't proposed how to change the system so that all those ... deserving people could get fired.

I've put something on the table, the spoils system, however problematic, that will enable his desired tactic. I'm all ears for others.

Can you elaborate on this?

She was brilliant. Little coding experience outside of Perl, but was able to keep up on the exercises in Java with only minor hiccups due to her lack of familiarity. She had been recruited out of graduate school.

On the other hand, she became extremely hostile when the Snowden incident was mentioned by people next to us (they didn't know her former employer) and was stating repeatedly that "None of you know what you're talking about, and if I was allowed to I would correct you, but I can't." and "Do you really think people can just sit down at a computer and spy on people without their supervisor's approval?" (as it turns out, we were right, and she was profoundly wrong)

It was a revealing moment, because it demonstrated the group think that can permeate even the most brilliant mind. Of course, she also thought there was nothing wrong with mathematics education in the U.S., which in my opinion makes her clearly deluded.

I'm pretty sure some decent fraction of the entities Healthcare.gov queries behind the scenes are doing their job.

Well, most of the time. One thing that occurred to me is that if certain actions require a lot of backend queries to different sources, multiplying the probabilities each could outright fail or blow the window could result in an overall flaky system.

Which doesn't directly explain why the offline part of the registration system is failing so often.

"Emerging errors include duplicate enrollments, spouses reported as children, missing data fields and suspect eligibility determinations, say executives at more than a dozen health plans. Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Nebraska said it had to hire temporary workers to contact new customers directly to resolve inaccuracies in submissions. Medical Mutual of Ohio said one customer had successfully signed up for three of its plans."

On the other hand, if they get something, this tells us one simple method the insurance companies can generally use to resolve issues. Although it sounds like they'd best contact everyone who maybe signs up, and no doubt the system will be telling two or more companies that some customers have signed up....

A lot messier than CGI Federal's Medicare.gov's Part D prescription plan signup system, where in all fairness the info is binary (I've signed up with X plan) and both sides can depend on the site doing the right thing.

But I've stumbled across even more confirmation, first from a New York Times article on the 12th that I'm amazed we missed (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/us/politics/from-the-start...), which says:

"One highly unusual decision, reached early in the project, proved critical: the Medicare and Medicaid agency assumed the role of project quarterback, responsible for making sure each separately designed database and piece of software worked with the others, instead of assigning that task to a lead contractor."

And then a National Review Online (flagship publication of the Right, going back to 1955) article by a non-specialist who got information from 5 CMMS officials who also aren't software engineering types (but of course all concerned are learning a lot now, as I'm sure most of us did once upon a time). In http://nationalreview.com/corner/361577/assessing-exchanges-... he says they confirm most everything in the NYT article but the also disputed here by eyewitnesses claim that coding didn't start until February. For integration:

"The people I spoke with did all confirm the importance of one other detail in the Times story: that CMS did not hire a general contractor to manage the exchange project but handled that overall technical management task itself. None of the people I spoke with wanted to get into how this decision was made or at what level, but all of them agreed that it was a very bad idea and was at the core of the disaster they have so far experienced."

The above also might have input from the 3 insurance industry people he talked to.

And it's refreshing to see a lot of people put politics somewhat to the side to figure out just what went wrong in project management and software engineering land. The whole nation is getting an education in this, or as the NRO author put it:

"But [the CMMS officials] are policy and management people, not information-technology experts.

This latter point turns out to be quite important. The reaction of these individuals to what has happened in the last two weeks is the reaction of people who are coming to realize that their expectations and understanding of web development were mistaken. They believed (as I did too, I admit) that whatever technical problems the exchange sites encountered at first could be cleared up quickly and simply once things got going—that the contractors developing the websites could just respond to problems on the fly, as they became apparent. It is now increasingly obvious to them that this is simply not how things work, that building a website like this is a matter of exceedingly complex programming and not “design,” and that the problems that plague the federal exchanges (and some state exchanges) are much more severe and fundamental than anything they imagined possible. That doesn’t mean they can’t be fixed, of course, and perhaps even fixed relatively quickly, but it means that at the very least the opening weeks (and quite possibly months) of the Obamacare exchanges will be very different from what either the administration or its critics expected."

Well, its policy type critics. A lot of us expected the common big project screwups, which are hardly confined to the government.