I’m sure I am not anyone’s idea of an IT expert today – my degree in computer science from the early 1970s notwithstanding.
But there are some things about computer programming that, at least in a general sense, a guy like me still understands. And that’s why, when I hear about the nature of HealthCare.gov’s problems and the approach the administration is taking to fixing them, I recognize it could be a very long time before this thing is working correctly – if it ever does.
The New York Times is reporting that 5 million lines of code need to be re-written before the web site runs properly. Now you can’t just have one person write 5 million lines of code. Try walking around America giving away $5 million, $1 at a time, and see how long that takes.
In order to understand how this needs to be done, you need to understand that computer systems are set up in modules. Each modules is assigned to a group of programmers, who write code for that module. I have no idea how many modules there are to HealthCare.gov, although I like to think there are 17 for each trillion dollars of debt we’re now shouldering thanks in no small part to Barack Obama. But regardless, the rewriting of each module of code is not the end of the story. There is also a thing called the interface, which is what allows the modules to talk to each other. As you change the modules, you need to change the interface too, so an entirely separate team will have to write the new interface to reflect the modified modules.
This is how you design a computer system properly. It doesn’t sound like that’s the way HealthCare.gov was designed at all, which is one of the reasons it doesn’t work.
By the way, even Obama seems to be leaving open the door to delaying the individual mandate. I know he hates that idea with every fiber of his being, but there’s no way the government can start punishing people for not doing something the government itself has made it impossible to do through its own incompetence.
That may be the wise door-left-open decision Obama has ever made, even if he doesn’t like making it.
By the way, if this is how competently the government handles building the web site, how do you think it’s actually going to do at running ObamaCare?
