President Obama admitted during an interview with Fast Company about the role of technology in government that the Obamacare exchange website Healthcare.gov was a disaster.
Obama said that, though the federal government is saturated with “really smart people,” its employment of technology has been historically “terrible,” a fact the president particularly took note of — and one which “distressed” him — after witnessing the cutting edge use of technology by his presidential campaigns.
According to Obama, he began “fairly quickly” to encourage his administration to make better and more efficient use of technology, a priority that, unfortunately, took a backseat to dealing with the faltering economy, the collapsing auto industry and the country’s presence in wars abroad.
“This did not get the kind of laser-focused attention until Healthcare.gov, which was a well–documented disaster, but ended up anyways being the catalyst for us saying, ‘Okay, we have to completely revamp how we do things,'” Obama detailed of his push to focus on technology.
Healthcare.gov, of course, endured significant hiccups and, as a result, criticism when the Obamacare website rolled out in 2013. The glitches made it either difficult or impossible for individuals to sign up for health coverage using the online exchange, forcing Obama to call for a “tech surge” to fix the issues with the website.
Later in his interview with Fast Company, Obama went into more detail about the chief problem with the way that Healthcare.gov was conceived.
“Part of the problem with Healthcare.gov was not that we didn’t have a lot of hardworking people paying attention to it, but traditionally the way you purchase IT services, software, and programs is by using the same procurement rules and specification rules that were created in the 1930s,” Obama explained.
“What we know is, the best designs and best programs are iterative,” he continued. “You start out with, ‘What do you want to accomplish?’ The team starts to brainstorm and think about it, and ultimately you come up with something and you test it. And that’s not how we did Healthcare.gov.”
In a rare moment, Obama actually assumed some responsibility for the website’s failure, admitting that he “should have anticipated” that the method of conception would yield faulty results.
“It’s something, by the way, I should have caught, I should have anticipated,” Obama admitted. “That you couldn’t use traditional procurement mechanisms in order to build something that had never been built before and was pretty complicated. So part of what we’re going to have to do is just change culture, change administrative habits, and get everybody thinking in a different way.”
Obama concluded that the role of technology in government should be “to make ‘we the people’ mean something in a 21st-century context.”
Tell that to 20th century presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her unread emails.
