Here Is Today's Jaw-Dropping Healthcare.gov Article

These appear to be coming out once a day now. From WaPo:

The Obama administration will consider the new federal insurance marketplace a success if 80 percent of users can buy health-care plans online, according to government and industry officials familiar with the project.

The goal for how many people should be able to make it through the insurance exchange is an internal target that administration officials have not made public. It acknowledges that as many as one in five Americans who try to use the Web site to buy insurance will be unable to do so.

Oh, well. Eggs and omelettes.

But Zients also said that “new bugs and other glitches will surface” in December and beyond that and will need to be fixed. Even if the site works well, he said, “that doesn’t mean that the site will be sufficient for 100 percent of users or consumers to use for enrollment.”

Until last month, no concrete performance measures had been developed for HealthCare.gov, the first-ever government computer system for consumers to buy private insurance, several officials confirmed.

“Many asked about benchmarks,” said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the topic’s sensitivity. But there was “no schedule of them.”

When HHS in 2011 invited contractors to bid on the chance to build HealthCare.gov, the department’s “statement of work” did not include requirements typical of many IT contracts in which interested companies must spell out how the system would perform, according to an industry representative close to the project, who was granted anonymity in order to speak frankly. The agreement that CGI Federal, the company chosen as the main contractor, signed on Sept. 30, 2011, also did not contain specific performance criteria, success measures or response times.

I think Andrew Stiles was half-kidding here, but maybe it is time for prosecutions.

Stay tuned tonight. I'm sure there will be more.

posted by JohnE. at 12:21 PM

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