U.S. government officials have blamed the poor-performing CGI software on massive traffic, but outside experts said it likely reflected programming choices as well. "It's a bug in the system, a coding problem," said Jyoti Bansal, chief executive of AppDynamics, a San Francisco-based company that builds products that monitor websites and identifies problems.
Bansal said, "Before you launch you run a lot of load testing with twice the load of the peak, so you can go through and remove glitches. I'm a very very big supporter of the health-care act, but I don't buy the argument that the load was too unexpected."
Canadian provincial health officials last year fired CGI. CGI was officially terminated in September, 2012 by the Ontario government's health agency after the firm missed three years of deadlines and failed to deliver the province's flagship online medical registry. Ontario is Canada's most populous province with about half of Canada's total population.
If Ontario can fire CGI for failing to deliver on time, the U.S. government can and should do the same. Since Americans are not required to have healthcare until January 1, 2014, we still have time to fix healthcare.gov by opening up the process to true competitive bidding by U.S. companies only.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
3
3
3
