skullz writes:
"I've watched the Affordable Care Act's federal and state website roll-outs with trepidation as one botched IT project crashes and burns after another. As more information is coming out about Minnesota's health insurance exchange, lo and behold, poor communication, lack of fundamentals, and bureaucracy seem to be contributing factors.
From NPR's How A Series Of Mistakes Hobbled Minnesota's Health Exchange we learn that the users were the first to actually test the website:
What Minnesotans did not know is they were testing the site. There wasn't time for consumer testing before the site went live. Michael Krigsman, a consultant who specializes in diagnosing and preventing IT project failures, says testing is key. 'That is so screwed up. You can quote me on that,' he says. 'This is one of these things that's so foundational. It's like why do we need to breathe the air?"
Having been on projects with shifting scope, compressed timeframes, and arbitrary milestones I feel for the developers who worked on these websites and am a little depressed that we are still doing this in 2014. When will the managers learn? Or at least listen?"
(Score: 3, Informative) by sl4shd0rk on Friday March 14 2014, @01:53PM
It's pretty simple, really. During the "debt ceiling" drama, the Republican side of the aisle in Congress had to agree to some of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) stuff that they were vehemently against. These individuals are largely funded through mega corps and investors (Koch bros., Tobacco companies, et al.) and a manufactured constituent base [huffingtonpost.com].
There has been mountains of cash injected into the Republican congress by these companies to get what they need to procure their own wealth and keep everyone else poor (To be fair, the Democrat end isn't so innocent either). They want absolutely nothing to do with funding ACA and are actively trying [huffingtonpost.com] to turn the rest of their Fox viewing idiot nation voting base against ACA with a misinformation campaign.
It's no suprise to me that a couple million bucks in the right pockets can completely f#ck up any ACA program or website on the planet. This is typical Capitalism at work where most of the voting base is too lazy to google anything beyond the latest viral Youtube video or Reality TV drama.