Ask HN: How would you fix the healthcare.gov website? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How would you fix the healthcare.gov website?

7 pointsjamessun7 comments

According to the Washington Post, "The Obama administration said Sunday that it has enlisted additional computer experts from across the government and from private companies to help rewrite computer code and make other improvements to the online health insurance marketplace, which has been plagued by technical defects that have stymied many consumers since it opened nearly three weeks ago."

What advice would you give President Obama in regards to addressing the technical issues with HealthCare.gov?

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The same advice I would give the designers of the Titanic after it sunk: you really should have thought more about this ahead of time.

In all seriousness: Open source it. Tell the dev's to put it on Github, and let the global development community figure out what the hell is going on.

I like the first part but not the idea of open sourcing it. Why does the American government want "the global development community" involved? That makes no sense to me.

Decisiveness. Per this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583327 the contractors have been without decisive high level strategic decisions while the White House and HHS/it's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMMS) decide what to do, hopefully by Thursday.

Fire the CMMS as the integrator, borrow a few of their more cluefull people and have them work with a contractor that can do this sort of thing.

Take your time. And deliver. Entrust some small but really smart team with fixing the thing. And give them absolute power related to the project.

The situation is so bad right now that the second launch - doesn't matter when it will be, but it just have to work.

Also make sure that head rolls in the procurement parts of the agencies responsible and claw back maximum amount of money possible.

Link to Washington Post article, http://wapo.st/19kTpEP

Delegate as soon as possible / Don't mess around with things you don't understand.

The idea that you need the president making technical decisions is madness. Go find a reputable company and ask them to implement your basic functionality for a decent fee, (actually offer one, don't just seek the lowest bidder,) then get out of the way and let them to do so - payment on successful delivery, no alterations to what you ask for after the fact, complete autonomy within operational parameters. You can iterate to fine tune the things you'd like it to have after the base case is up.

Short term: Assuming it can scale, and that many of the problems result from various timeouts (e.g. I recall one report on a 5 - 7 second timeout for a IRS data request), then throw hardware at it. Get out the checkbook, call up Amazon, or whomever, get them to physically segregate a collection of machines, and ramp up.

Long term: Take it in-house. Enough of this contractor bullshit. The Government is known to have some effective auditing agencies. Turn them loose on the resulting program.

Also: First make it work. Then make it pretty. What are the American people most going to notice? Whether it fucking works.

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