Following the disastrous rollout of healthcare.gov, it became obvious that someone would need to lose their job. People want accountability, and let’s be honest here, the problems that plagued the site may have been caused by contractors in over their head and with employees not capable of the job, but it was the responsibility of the government to correct these problems and replace contractors if need be.
Back when the Medicare-D program came out during the Bush years and there were tons of failures, similar to what the ACA has seen, Democrats jumped on the Bush administration over the problems, and rightfully so. Overnight we saw seniors unable to get the necessary medications their lives depend on. But there is a big difference between that program and the ACA. Medicare-D wasn’t a pinnacle of the Bush administration, but the ACA is the jewel in Obama’s. That point alone is why the failure in government oversight of the project are so troubling. Was Sebelius not concerned about the progress and problems on the site leading up to the October 1 rollout? If so, then that was a horrible lax of judgment on her part and one that should be met with resignation.
There are some fellow liberals out there that want to try and give Sebelius cover by claiming she wasn’t informed of the problems leading up to the rollout. I find that very hard to believe and if she didn’t know, it was a failure as a leader. I also want to remind these people that we are seeing the same thing play out in New Jersey. If we can believe that dozens of employees kept these huge problems from Sebelius, then who are we to say that a few employees in the Christie administration didn’t keep bridgegate from the governor?
But her not knowing just doesn’t sit right with me. I followed the congressional hearings very closely and there were a set of emails released that included dozen of employees of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is a department under Sebelius control. These emails were about huge problems facing the site less than 3 months before launch. Now maybe the project lead, Henry Chao didn’t say anything, but to say no one else did is really hard to believe.
As a developer who has lead countless projects, I read through these emails and my stomach started turning. It quickly became obvious that quality wasn’t the expectation, but rather meeting a deadline. That’s something that happens in the tech world all too often and is quickly met with problems. We saw it this week with the Heartbleed bug that opened up millions to having secure web transmissions intercepted. We had code quickly rushed out, with minimal review. That lead to one little line being omitted in a critical part of the code and to a huge security hole.
To better understand this, you need to understand how development works. It’s much like writing a book, and sometimes a very, very big book. You are putting together words to form sentences, or in this case statements. You need to have a good flow to these sentences and not leave out little things, like facts. On top of that, punctuation is a key. But unlike writing a book, when coding something as simple as missing an exclamation point can be fatal. Take !==. Now that might look like jibberish to you, but to a developer it’s a very critical component of development calls a comparison operator. Those 3 characters, !==, means “doesn’t equal”. So 3 !== 4 is a true statement. But what if you forgot that exclamation point? Well then you get ==, which means “equals” and now our simple statement of 3 == 4 becomes true.
I bring up this little lesson in programming because of the problems that plagued healthcare.gov and the rush that was done to get it out the door. In my example above, the problem wouldn’t present an error, so that means the only way to see if something like that happened is through comprehensive testing. I’ve been developing for almost 30 years and can tell you that more time is spent testing than actually writing code. But after 3 years of development time, and with less than 3 months to go before launching, there were key components not even written yet, meaning there was no time to test. That was a failure of huge proportions and the buck does stop at Sebelius’ desk.
I also have a feeling President Obama realizes this. Last week, when Obama announced that over 7 million people had enrolled, there was something missing from the celebration. That was Kathleen Sebelius. She wasn’t present during the speech. Why wouldn’t the President have the person who headed up this undertaking there when he announced this huge milestone? Because Obama realizes that Sebelius is now the face of the failures of last fall and that would diminish the celebratory nature of the day. In other words, she has become a liability for the administration and any future plans.
In short, Sebelius had to go. I commend her on sticking it out long enough to make sure that the system got running smoothly. If she were to leave when Republicans wanted her to, then we would still be facing catastrophic problems and even more calls for repeal. Instead she did stick through the relentless hounding and calls for resignation and saw that the problems that were created under her leadership were also fixed. She deserves big kudos for that.