Marty's Travels

My house has wheels

Cover Oregon

That’s the name of the state-operated system to implement the Affordable Care Act, totally notorious now that it’s been declared a complete failure. Unlike the Federal ACA “website”, this one just plain didn’t happen at all.

An audit report of what went wrong came out the other day and I’ve been hearing a lot about it. Today I read the executive summary of the problems. Wow, do I know what they are talking about.

In my former life I was involved in several government IT projects, some good and some bad. Generally speaking, most government IT projects have been described as “multi-million dollar boondoggles” that failed to deliver anything, though there are some that work that no one hears about.

There were many things going wrong in Oregon, but the audit tellingly starts with an old, old issue of “ownership”. The project was run by three different agencies of the state government. To anyone with any experience in government, this is a guaranteed path to boondoggle. After that, everything goes wrong.

The top people involved have been relieved of their positions (no biggie, they were only political appointees, it’s not like Oregon has lost talent or experience or anything), and Oregon is now promising they’d get their act together by November. They’d be fools to try this again, better to just turn it over to the Feds and forever be remembered as the text-book case in how government IT projects go wrong.

Chimacum tomorrow.