By now almost everybody has heard of the chaos surrounding
the government’s roll out of ObamaCare health care exchanges in 36 states. As near as anyone outside the government can
tell (the government thus far refuses to talk about the issue at all),
something like 1% of the people who have tried to enroll thus far have been
successful, and insurance companies are in chaos because the system is feeding
them bad or incomplete information. Thank
goodness IBM put me into a private exchange rather that the government exchange
when they dropped retiree health care (thanks again Mr. you can keep your current
insurance if you like it!).
Of course the problem was predictable. Congress (well, the Democrats) expected
states to build these exchanges, though of course they didn’t give the states
any money to do that, nor enough time.
Not surprisingly, 36 states refused, since no money came with the
request and states are having enough fiscal problems of their own.
So the government had to build them, on the same inadequate schedule
they had given the states, and with no money appropriated to do the job. Now a little-known statistic outside of the
system engineering field is that over the past four decades about 65% of
systems built by the government are so flawed they are never fielded, and the
reminder typically take millions of dollars and years to fix enough to make
them able to be rolled out. So this is typical, just more public and embarrassing
for the administration than usual.
But it sure shows why you really don’t want the government
building big IT systems. It’s hard enough when private companies do it, but at least
the private companies fire the incompetent managers and programmers when this
happens, unlike the government.
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