White House Recruits Tiger Team to Fix HealthCare.gov

The Obama Administration is bringing in software experts from inside and outside government in what it calls a “tech surge” to fix the ailing online health insurance marketplace HealthCare.gov, officials said in a blog post Sunday.

The move comes nearly three weeks after the site’s rocky launch, after which less than 1% of online insurance seekers successfully enrolled in a plan. It comes less than one week after the end of a partial government shutdown that put at least some of those experts out of work and on furlough status.

Among those selected for the team is U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park, a former healthcare software entrepreneur and Health and Human Services Department CTO who was involved in the early stages of building HealthCare.gov, according to a report from Bloomberg News. It also includes some Presidential Innovation Fellows, a short-term program for tech entrepreneurs to pitch in on specific government projects that Park helped spearhead, Bloomberg reported. Read more...