As anyone who reads my blog knows, I am a great fan of President Obama and think his Affordable Care Healthcare program is long overdue for this country. I would have preferred a single payer system rather than continuing to finance insurance companies making profits off sick people, but this is better than the way it was. The rollout however of the online registration was embarrassingly full of glitches. On researching this, I learned that the companies they contracted for this project (Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corporation (NYSE:BAH) (Edward Snowden’s company!), CGI Federal Inc (NYSE:GIB), the Mitre Corporation, Quality Software Service Inc., Genova Technology and Experian plc (LON:EXPN)) may have used the wrong approaches for such a web site intended to serve perhaps millions of people and to interface with Medicare, Medicaid, etc. And of course the companies have either not responded to requests for information or pointed fingers and complained that they had done what was requested and it was the fault of the other partners. One major problem with all government contract work is that the software is always proprietary information and not open source, and I would be blown over if this were not also the case for this project.
It is well known that making software “open source” has been a real revolution in the software industry which has led to the amazing platforms of e.g. Amazon, Google, Twitter and Facebook, where the code is immediately available for the thousands of open source developers to work on. Unfortunately Federal government software will probably never be open source, even in this case, and this means that the Healthcare site problems may persist much longer than necessary.
In lieu of an open source solution to this problem, let me make a modest proposal. Where is the best concentration of software developers perhaps in the entire world? Of course it is in the U.S. National Security Agency. Why does not the administration simply have the NSA immediately put its best web developers to work on repairing and making the healthcare web services run better in order to truly well serve the American population. I feel this is as important a task as gathering and searching through everyone’s telephone calls, emails and Google searches, and would take just a small fraction of the immense resources already present in this Agency.
Just a thought.
