Healthcare.gov built on ten year old tech, needs six months of upgrades, may be un-fixable

Don't worry. It's just glitches. There's nothing to see here. Please, move along. In a few days, everything will be right as rain.

That's the message coming from the left, which seems content to whistle past the graveyard that is the Affordable Care Act's federal exchange. Sure, they admit, it sounds bad; but just ignore those pesky conservative blogs and everything will be fine. The only problem is that things have gotten so out-of-control that even staunch left wing news outlets are being forced to report on how bad they are. Today, the double whammy comes from USA Today and MSNBC.

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According to USA Today, the Healthcare.gov website is in far worse shape than anyone in the administration is admitting. That's unsurprising, but the level to which it's been botched is looking to be truly spectacular. According to their sources, Healthcare.gov was built by an incompetent IT company using badly outdated ten-year-old technology. From a USA Today piece entitled "Tech experts: Health exchange site needs total overhaul"

The federal health care exchange was built using 10-year-old technology that may require constant fixes and updates for the next six months and the eventual overhaul of the entire system, technology experts told USA TODAY. 'The site could be perfect, but if the systems from which it draws data are not up to speed, it doesn't matter,' said John Engates, chief technology officer at Rackspace, a cloud computer service provider. 'It is a core problem in the sense of it's fundamental to this thing actually working, but it's not necessarily a problem that the people who wrote HealthCare.gov can get to,' Engates said. 'Even if they had a perfect system, it still won't work.'

In other words, it might be possible to keep the site limping along at its current pace, but it may be impossible to fix it without completely rebuilding it from the ground up. The USA Today piece came up this morning on MSNBC's program "Morning Joe." There, a panel discussion featured the Kelly Kennedy, the USA Today reporter who dropped the bombshell. As usual, MSNBC does its best to blame George Bush. Then Mika Brzezinski tries to insinuate that it's all Ted Cruz's fault. In the end though, they can't escape the simple fact that the chaos surrounding the Obamacare rollout is 100% owned by the Obama administration. Asked if the site is actually fixable, Kennedy said "That's up for debate." Anyone care to speculate how that "debate" is going to turn out? The clip below is pretty spectacular. Especially when you consider how much MSNBC must hate reporting it. Enjoy Mika's bold proclamation that "It seems to me this needs to be fixed," and be sure to "like" Robert Laurie over on Facebook or follow him on Twitter. You'll be glad you did.