One of the Tech World’s Biggest Experts Just Said HealthCare.gov Needs to be Completely Re-Done

According to one of the world’s biggest technology experts, Rackspace CTO John Engates, HealthCare.gov is so flawed it needs to be scrapped and rebuilt from scratch.

From 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.'”

…

“‘I have never seen a website — in the last five years — require you to delete the cache in an effort to resolve errors,’ said Dan Schuyler, a director at Leavitt Partners, a health care group by former Health and Human Services secretary Mike Leavitt. ‘This is a very early Web 1.0 type of fix.’

“‘The application could be fundamentally flawed,’ said Jeff Kim, president of CDNetworks, a content-delivery network. ‘They may be using 1990s technology in 2.0 world.'”

…

“Engates said HHS has been opaque about the problems, and the tech industry doesn’t know the extent of the issues. ‘There’s no secrets leaking out,’ he said. ‘I’m sure everyone’s looking for something to change the direction of the conversation, but it’s just not there.’

“‘I think it’s a data problem,’ Kim said. ‘It always comes down to that.’

“And if that’s the case, the problems are beyond ‘rocky,’ he said. Instead, it would require a ‘fundamental re-architecture.’ In the meantime, ‘I think they’re just trying to shore up as quickly as possible. They don’t have time to start from scratch.'”