In the Time Magazine March 10 2014 edition there is an article on how the Affordable Health Care Act’s Healthcare.gov site was fixed.

When the healthcare.gov site was launched in October 2013, a mere hundred or so users caused the site to crash.

Typical of government led initiatives, the different sections responsible did not work in unison and there was no clearly identifiable person in charge of the site. Different parts did not know what was going on, so each assumed all was well and progressing forward. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) spent over $300 million on building a website that did not work. Their tech people forgot simple things like creating a cache, where most frequently accessed information is stored in a layer above the database. In that way queries could proceed quickly and not tie up the entire site – this is done in commercial sites.

The White House was forced to hire properly skilled tech folks from companies like Google to revamp the health care website. The newly hired consultants found that the original government designed site “hadn’t been designed to work right…that any single thing that slowed down would slow everything down.” Many of these troubleshooters fixed the site at a fraction of their usual pay. The lesson is that rich government contracts are awarded to incompetent cronies or to the lowest bidder. Since this is not a meritocracy, it’s unlikely that contracts would go to the most qualified at the onset. The good news for the government is that others can be hired later to do repairs.

Since originally there was no leader of healthcare.gov, we will never find out who was responsible for this mess and why so much money was wasted in the first place.