Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site

[Jesus Malverde]

Federal contractors have identified most of the main problems crippling President Obama’s online health insurance marketplace, but the administration has been slow to issue orders for fixing those flaws, and some contractors worry that the system may be weeks away from operating smoothly, people close to the project say.

Administration officials approached the contractors last week to see if they could perform the necessary repairs and reboot the system by Nov. 1. However, that goal struck many contractors as unrealistic, at least for major components of the system. Some specialists working on the project said the online system required such extensive repairs that it might not operate smoothly until after the Dec. 15 deadline for people to sign up for coverage starting in January, although that view is not universally shared.

In interviews, experts said the technological problems of the site went far beyond the roadblocks to creating accounts that continue to prevent legions of users from even registering. Indeed, several said, the login problems, though vexing to consumers, may be the easiest to solve. One specialist said that as many as five million lines of software code may need to be rewritten before the Web site runs properly.

“The account creation and registration problems are masking the problems that will happen later,” said one person involved in the repair effort.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/us/insurance-site-seen-needing-weeks-to-fix.html?hp&_r=0

Insurers have found that the system provides them with incorrect information about some enrollees, repeatedly enrolls and cancels the enrollments of others, and simply loses the enrollments of still others.

[Zorra]

1. RW industrial sabotage. nt

[Revanchist]

7. I still don't think it was sabotage

Like others have said down thread, you don't hire 55 different contractors to work on a project. Unless you believe the upper management of the Department of Health and Human Services are right wing plants, I have to respectfully disagree with you on the sabotage theory.

[NoOneMan]

2. 5 millions lines of code?!?

LOL

What do they just have monkeys slapping keyboards? Idiots.

Keep it simple. Elegance. Reuse code. Abstraction

5 Millions lines...god....maybe they thought they got paid by the semi-colons.

[Jesus Malverde]

4. Simple?

One major problem slowing repairs, people close to the program say, is that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency in charge of the exchange, is responsible for making sure that the separately designed databases and pieces of software from 55 contractors work together.

[NoOneMan]

5. Yeah, simple

First off, don't have 55 contractors working together on this. Secondly, making different databases communicate is not new or difficult. There are plenty of established webservice protocols that are easy to deploy to make systems communicate over a network (XML-RPC, REST, SOAP, etc). You publish behavior and inputs in documents and users comply to that to ensure their applications communicate effectively. This stuff is not unheard of. People do it every day. Its not amazingly difficult or even complex to a trained, experienced developer

[JDPriestly]

3. Is the problem with the identity management system or something else?

CGI Federal, a unit of the CGI Group, based in Montreal, has the biggest contract and is responsible for the architecture of major parts of the system, but not for its integration. Quality Software Services Inc., or Q.S.S.I., a unit of the UnitedHealth Group, developed the identity management system, another major component that allowed consumers to register and establish accounts.

The identity management system from Q.S.S.I., which also taps into government databases to retrieve users’ personal information, was a particular source of trouble when the exchange opened. Change orders show that on Oct. 4 — after millions of people had been trapped in technological loops trying merely to log in — the government asked CGI to help it devise a new identity management system to replace the one provided by Q.S.S.I. But specialists said that approach was abandoned as too risky. Ultimately it was decided to fix the current identity system.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/us/insurance-site-seen-needing-weeks-to-fix.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp

Somebody goofed.

[msongs]

6. so, who's been fired for incompetence? oh, pvt contractors don't get canned I guess nt