Want Healthcare.gov To Work? Destroy And Rebuild Federal IT Procurement

The conversation started the first week after healthcare.gov launched. Maybe the problem was federal procurement, not Obamacare.

Clay Johnson is the founder of Department of Better Technology and a former White House Innovation Fellow. In an interview with NPR, he explained why healthcare.gov was not built by a company that knows how to build web sites:

“The problem is that the way that federal contracting works is so burdensome that the only people who get contracts like this are experts at lobbying and experts at regulations that require you to get these sorts of contracts. And they’re not experts at doing the job of building these websites.”

The following week on BuzzFeed, Alex Howard wrote a excellent analysis of why the first Internet president had the biggest Internet failure and explained in more detail the rules around procurement: