Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the requirements stage

If it's anything like what I saw at the one (and only) government contractor I ever worked for, the site is a frankensteinian nightmare of COTS ('Commercial Off The Shelf') crap (which federal contracts encourage, when they don't outright require it) and sweatshop-style integration development run by contractors who hire anybody with a heartbeat and a handful of competent people, and pay them all peanuts while billing $200/hr in labor to the government.

- Maintaining complex code (+1mil LOC)

- Classic "waterfall" approaches to software development (and the inherent problem with trying to blueprint requirements up front)

- The mythical man month[1]

- Change management

Funny thing is...these are all human problems.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/us/politics/from-the-start... (October 12)

And from today (Oct 21): http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/us/insurance-site-seen-nee...

In a previous life I worked on similar software development projects at the US State level. This project was several orders of magnitude larger in scope and in complexity than what I worked on. Assuming a generous start date for Spring - say March 1 - this boils down to ~7 months to design and develop to the Oct 1 hard deadline. Nearly impossible in my opinion.

I'm not discounting that there couldn't be issues else where in whole process. These would include: communication overhead between all the various agencies and contractors, integration nightmares, and not enough skilled folks at Medicare to manage all of this. But having the requirements delivered several months before roll-out seems to me a recipe for disaster.

It still boggles my mind that people are surprised by this. Mathematically, including people with pre-existing conditions will mean either that those people are required to pay for the (expected, not actual) costs of their own care, or that other people will be required to pay for those costs[0]. This effect is much larger than the effect of mandating insurance for younger, healthier people who otherwise elected out of getting insurance[1].

Note: this is not a normative statement about whether this is a "good" outcome. This is just a a mathematical observation about the way insurance works, from a mathematical and economic perspective.

[0] Subsidies come from taxpayer money, so they have no net effect on this accounting - it changes how the money changes hands, but the money still has to come from somewhere.

[1] I'm waving my hands around the math here, but if people are interested I can dig up the more detailed blog post draft that I did a while back explaining this in full detail.