Open-Source Everything: The Moral of the Healthcare.gov Debacle

Right as the U.S. government shut down on Oct. 1, the new national health-care exchange went live at healthcare.gov. Intended for people who want to buy health insurance under the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, the website failed from the start. It was unusable to hundreds of thousands of Americans who wanted to enroll. Screens wouldn’t load. A woman trying to get help via Web chat was told to “please be patient” an infuriating 40 times. Despite pledges from Obama administration officials that the “glitches” would be quickly fixed, the list of bugs and problems kept growing.

Healthcare.gov isn’t just a website; it’s more like a platform for building health-care marketplaces. Visiting the site is like visiting a restaurant. You sit in the dining room, read the menu and tell the waiter what you want, and off he goes to the kitchen with your order. The dining room is the front end, with all the buttons to click and forms to fill out. The kitchen is the back end, with all the databases and services. The contractor most responsible for the back end is CGI Federal. Apparently it’s this company’s part of the system that’s burning up under the load of thousands of simultaneous users. Read more...