In a move that could be described by the cliché “better late than never,” it appears the U.S. Government has finally reached out to the experts to fix the beleaguered Healthcare.gov.
Details are minimal at the moment, but CNBC broke the news via Twitter on Thursday shortly before Noon PDT that the Obama administration has tapped at least three Silicon Valley heavyweights to fix the problematic website: Google, Oracle, and Red Hat.
Bloomberg further reported that a spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services declared there are now “dozens of software engineers, developers, designers and analysts, who are methodically working around the clock on performance and functionality of healthcare.gov.”
Healthcare.gov launched at the beginning of October amid the government shutdown, and the digital exchange has been plagued with problems and criticism ever since.
Glitches (putting it mildly) have ranged from site crashes and downtimes, erroneous data, and possible privacy violations.
The health insurance website forms one of the cornerstones of the President’s domestic agenda, and there have already been plenty of hearings at the U.S. Capitol this week determining who to pin the blame on within the administration.
President Obama himself deemed the glitches as unacceptable, last week pledging we would see “some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government to scrub in with the team” in efforts to improve the site.
The extra help will have to act fast. Healthcare.gov is scheduled to close its doors for registration on December 15 to meet the deadline for 2014 enrollment.