Greg welcomes guests Sherrod Small, Jedediah Bila and Jesse Joyce.
The Regime's Much-Hyped ObamaCare "Tech Surge" a PR Stunt, Was Really Just Six People
The week QSSI took over, HealthCare.gov - a site Mr. Obama once promised would be as easy to shop on as Amazon.com - went dark for 10 to 12 hours, unheard of in the online business world. But the bigger problem was organizational.
"People looked like they were busy," said Andrew Slavitt, group executive vice president for QSSI and its parent company, Optum, "but it was hard to tell what they were working on and how it fit in."
But while the contractors were grateful to Mr. Zients for helping to create order, they saw the administration's "tech surge" - announced by Mr. Obama in the Rose Garden a few days before QSSI took over - as mostly an exercise in public relations.
The announcement conjured images of an army of software engineers descending on the project. In fact, the surge centered on about a half-dozen people who had taken leave from various technology companies to join the effort. They included Michael Dickerson, a site reliability engineer at Google who had also worked on Mr. Obama's campaign and now draws praise from contractors as someone who is "actually making a difference," one said.
Even so, one person working on the project said, "Surge was probably an overstatement."
Obama Administration: "The 'Tech Surge' is whatever we say it is little people. Besides, it wasn't 6 people, it was a half-dozen!"
ReplyDeleteThe Titanic resumes sailing in calm waters. All is well on the horizon.