Could A Tech Giant Build A Better Health Exchange? Maybe Not

Update: Could A Tech Giant Build A Better Health Exchange? Maybe Not

"The state (Oregon) paid tech giant Oracle to build its online exchange, but with the site still not functional, people shopping for insurance have been forced to apply on paper. As recently as two weeks ago, the state had not yet managed to sign up a single person for private health insurance under the federal Affordable Care Act."

I'm wondering just what is so difficult about this process.

User comment:

I was reading a post by an IT guy with NASA that described the ACA website process as a prime example of mission creep, something he characterized as that which should be avoided if you ever want your program to work. Apparently, HHS was still making major changes to the scope and requirements documents in July of 2013. Some of these required rebuilding portions of the program that had already been completed and tested months earlier. According to that poster, this was the reason that it was not ready to be tested in its entirety until less than two weeks before it was launched.

Scoop's thoughts:

Yes. When you put it that way it makes sense. Creating the health care website should not be difficult, but even genius programmers have trouble hitting a moving target. My guess is that the problem was further compounded with database issues: (1) the databases that need to be accessed are probably in many different formats, probably including some obsolete ones, and (2) there are probably some complicated privacy issues regarding limiting the full access to those databases. And then there are probably many programmers assigned to different parts of the project and they are not being properly and tightly co-ordinated the way they would be at (for example) Google. But I'm just guessing. The moving target issue does sound like a logical explanation.