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Massachusetts is preparing to abandon its troubled ObamaCare website, a system so problematic that the state was forced to enroll tens of thousands of people in temporary insurance plans through Medicaid.  The plan underscores the depth of technical problems with the Massachusetts Health Connector and echoes a recent decision by Cover Oregon, another glitch-ridden marketplace, to hand federal health officials the reins to its system this month.  Massachusetts officials are pursuing what they described as a "dual-track strategy" for their insurance marketplace, combining new, off-the-shelf enrollment software with a back-up plan to shift the system into HealthCare.gov if the transition takes...

The Obama administration has offshore outsourced Obamacare. They made Accenture the lead contractor for the website healthcare.gov. The contract is estimated to be worth $90 million and the original contractor, CGI Federal, is out. We pointed out earlier that the failed Obamacare website was poetic justice as CGI Federal is also an offshore outsourcer of U.S. jobs. But now the poster boy for labor arbitrage, offshore tax havens, and bloated, often failed government contracts is in charge, Accenture. Accenture is one of the biggest offshore outsourcers of American jobs. In 2012 they used 4,037 H-1B Visas alone and are ranked...

The day before the catastrophic Healthcare.gov was supposed to start offering insurance, internal reports show that the website was only configured to handle “1,100 users” at a single time before “response time gets too high.” The document was released by oversight.house.gov. Under the category “stress test,” testers for Healthcare.gov ran a performance evaluation on the site. This evaluation occurred on September 30, just one day before the site was ready to hit prime-time. During the testing, results were, quite frankly, atrocious. The tester writes (emphasis mine): Ran performance testing overnight in IMP1B environment. Working with CGI to tune the FFM...

Obama Administration Uses Pirated Code on Healthcare.gov The new Obamacare website Healthcare.gov has had its fair share of problems over the past weeks, and the trouble continues. As it turns out, the Government website uses the open source software DataTables, which is a plug-in for the jQuery Javascript library. While using open-source software is fine, the makers of Healthcare.gov decided to blatantly remove all references to its owners or the original copyright license. In other words, they simply took the open-source software and are passing it off as their own, a clear violation of the GPL v2 and BSD (3-point)...

Obamacare website to be down again for maintenance late Saturday 12:51pm EDT WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The glitch-ridden website used to sign up for insurance under President Barack Obama's healthcare law will be down for "extended maintenance" overnight on Saturday, the Department of Health and Human Services said. The website has been plagued by technology problems and has not worked reliably since its launch on October 1, embarrassing the administration and providing ammunition for Republicans seeking to roll back the law known as Obamacare. The application, enrollment tools, and "data hub" will not be available from about 9 p.m. ET on...

Good luck Mr. President "fixing" the mess of Obamacare code (at the very bottom in the graphic below) by December 1, 2013. Oh I forgot. He didn't know. He didn't know this either. (What DOES he know anyway?) (What did they use? Cobol? Fortran? Basic? Stacks of punch cards?) From Information Is Beautiful:

If you wanted to build a case study in the perfect recipe for IT project disaster, you wouldn't have to look any further than the new official Obamacare website, Healthcare.gov. The site, which was supposed to be the official gateway for Americans to purchase cheap (now clearly up for debate) health insurance, has become an overnight poster child for just how bad the government can fumble a well-to-do technology implementation. The common symptoms are all present: budget overruns, too little time to test, poor design & planning, and you can take it from there. So when the President came out...

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system. --John Gall

The company chosen by the Obama administration to oversee the repair of the new federal health insurance Web site faced questions from lawmakers a year ago about whether it was an appropriate choice for earlier work on the site, given that it is owned by the country’s largest health insurance company. Click here for full article================================================================== The No Gloating Zone If you were expecting any gloating from me over how Democrats are being hoisted on their own petard -- an unread law they rammed through the House and Senate on a party-line vote, using crooked means and against the will...

Today, on the CNN Money site, there is a terrific story about the problems surrounding the ObamaCare website. The story includes all kinds of new information from a host of experts, and most of the news is flat-out terrible: The half-billion dollar site needs to be rebuilt from scratch, the site has an unwieldy 500 million lines of computer code (it took just 500 thousand lines of code to send a rover to Mars), and that code is "riddled with security holes" that could result one of "the biggest breaches in American history[.]" These same experts do not think there...

The White House and insurance companies are creating “alpha teams” that will work to address the corrupted enrollment data that is being produced by the ObamaCare website. Senior administration officials, including White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, met with 14 executives from the nation's largest insurance companies on Wednesday to discuss how the geek squads would be deployed.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Crammed into conference rooms with pizza for dinner, some programmers building the Obama administration's showcase health insurance website were growing increasingly stressed. Some worked past 10 p.m., energy drinks in hand. Others rewrote computer code over and over to meet what they considered last-minute requests for changes from the government or other contractors. As questions mount over the website's failure, insider interviews and a review of technical specifications by The Associated Press found a mind-numbingly complex system put together by harried programmers who pushed out a final product that congressional investigators said was tested by the government...

Obamacare contractors: Don’t blame us By: Jennifer Haberkorn and Jason Millman and Brett Norman October 23, 2013 05:19 PM EDT The Obamacare website contractors plan to tell Congress on Thursday that they are not to blame for the massive problems at HealthCare.gov and that they completed successful testing before the Oct. 1 launch. But, according to prepared testimony, the four contractors ran into unforeseen problems once open enrollment began. The testimony offers a slight glimpse into the problems that made the website all but unworkable — and warnings that the problems are far from over. Lawmakers are expected to press...

Crammed into conference rooms with pizza for dinner, some programmers building the Obama administration’s showcase health insurance website were growing increasingly stressed. Some worked past 10 p.m., energy drinks in hand. Others rewrote computer code over and over to meet what they considered last-minute requests for changes from the government or other contractors. As questions mount over the website’s failure, insider interviews and a review of technical specifications by The Associated Press found a mind-numbingly complex system put together by harried programmers who pushed out a final product that congressional investigators said was tested by the government and not private...

Full Title: CNN: Blowing up HealthCare.Gov and starting over still looking like their best option, say more tech experts************************************************************* There’s a growing consensus on the mid- to late-November time frame by which the Obama administration really, really needs to have ObamaCare’s online portal running smoothly to avoid inducing more death-spiral risks and subsequent industry panic, and all of their plans for public outreach and directing people to call centers and whatnot is only going to get them so far.“Tech surge” or no tech surge, CNN reports that still more experts and computer engineers are piling on to the suggestion that...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Republican chairman of a key congressional oversight committee has asked Google, Microsoft and three other U.S. companies to provide details on their possible involvement in a "tech surge" aimed at fixing a website implementing President Barack Obama's signature healthcare law. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, made the request in a letter to Google, Microsoft, Verizon Enterprise Solutions, Oracle and Expedia, committee spokeswoman Caitlin Carroll said. Issa, a relentless critic of the Obama administration, wants information on contacts the companies may have had with the White House about the Healthcare.gov website...

“My overall sense, right from day one, was it was created by people who had never created a commercial database application before," said FMS Software developer Luke Chung. Chung looked over the site and was stunned by the code and the cost - by some estimates, perhaps $200 million. Chung continued, “At $200 an hour, that would be a million man hours, 5,000 man years. I don't think they had time to use 5,000 man years. So I don't know where the money went. I don't know what these people were doing. There're not that many web pages. I don't...

".................The Canadian-owned company built the website, and in testimony from September 10, it told the skeptical House Energy and Commerce committee that things were going just great. To date, the FFM implementation has achieved all of its key milestones from the initial Architecture Review in October 2011 to Project Baseline Review in March 2012 and, most recently, the Operational Readiness Review in September 2013. Additionally, in April 2013, health insurers began submitting their plans to the system for review by CMS. Starting in August 2013, consumers were able to go into the system and register their accounts. At this time,...

The White House has tabbed former acting Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Jeff Zients to work with the team overseeing repairs to the ObamaCare website. Zients, who served as the White House Chief Performance Officer, was named in September as the director of the National Economic Council. According to the administration, he will transition into that role at the end of this year. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Zients started on Monday to provide “short-term advice, assessments and recommendations” in a blog post obtained earlier on Tuesday by Bloomberg. White House press secretary Jay...

CGI, the Canadian company whose U.S. subsidiary built the failed Obamacare website, was once contracted to build a federal gun registry for the Canadian government... CGI's contract was canceled in 2007 after a report by the Auditor General found that the Canadian Firearms Information System (CFIS) being built by CGI was "significantly over budget" and that it had been plagued by delays. The Conservative government that took power in 2006 canceled CGI's gun registry contract, and eventually repealed the Canadian gun registry entirely. ... The failed gun registry was only one of CGI's many Canadian failures, which included canceled contracts...