It's all over the news and will be for the unforeseen future, but you wouldn't know it if you only read Hacker News.<p>HealthCare.gov has technical problems. Huge problems affecting millions of people <i>right now</i>. The media is perpetuating programmers as incompetent (in addition to the White House administration).<p>Considering how monumental HealthCare.gov and the Affordable Healthcare Act is, isn't this a great PR opportunity for one of the many health care start ups out there to offer some technical consulting? If you want to disrupt something BIG.. now is the opportunity. Wouldn't you like it if every newspaper gave a mention to your company: "XYZ.com, a company that does XYZ, worked with the Obama administration to restore HealthCare.gov and put it back in business for millions of Americans."
I'd go further than laurenstill: this is being done in such a non-transparent way (see <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6595704" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6595704</a> for details, and why the consequences are so bad), with only Verizon being named as part of the "<i>tech 'surge'</i>", that you certainly wouldn't get any up front PR.<p>It's also inherent in the nature of an emergency fix-it process that unless you've got connections and/or a stunning track record you won't be tapped to help. Heck, imagine all the well and ill intentioned people and orgs who are offering to help right now....<p>Then look at the primary cause for the debacle, HHS's CMS taking on the role of integrator and integration tester, and constantly changing the requirements, all the way through the last week before launch, which not coincidentally is when they started integration testing. Which of course failed hard, and was ignored.<p>Until these inexperienced managers of the project are removed from having anything to do with it, it's very unlikely to be successful. Well, maybe over the coming months they'll learn on the job, take techies suggestions they read <i>The Mythical Man Month</i> (something this "surge" is ignoring), etc. ... but for now it's a clusterf--k that I certainly wouldn't want my name attached to.<p>How much brand damage do you think CGI/CGI Federal is taking now? Why would you want some of that?
Several are trying, but without aanything being open sourced, and not not knowing what the data later looks like, it's a wee bit challenging.<p>Plus, HHS is dead set in bringing Verizon on board to clean the mess.