It seems to me that CMS Director Marilyn Tavenner got it about right in her testimony in Congress about the problems with the government healthcare website. Apologies are nice and always make everyone feel better, but a calm, objective look at the situation comes down to one simple observation: Mistakes happen.
In fact, as various observers have pointed out over the past few weeks, this is far from the first meltdown that has occurred when a new website, or a heavily revamped one, has been brought online amidst high expectation, only to fail miserably. Such problems have occurred in a variety of settings, including the Pentagon, the FBI, and some of our leading software and online companies.
Failures and crashes have become so predictable that they seem to be the norm. Seriously, now: If you've been told of major changes in a website, don't you approach it initially with some trepidation? You hope for the best but you know, deep down, that "There Will Be BSOD." That happened with me today when I spent a couple of hours entering data on the recently revamped website of an organization I'm connect with, only to find that when I saved the data, it just disappeared. (It turns out they did not make the site compatible with the current version of Microsoft Internet Explorer, the most widely used web browser. HUH?)
So, long story short: To call Healthcare.gov a "disaster" is to redefine disaster. A disaster is supposed to be a terrible unexpected, even unpredictable, outcome. In this area of human endeavor, though, failure is only to be expected.
It looks as if there's a dirty little secret underlying all this. I was struck by the fact the contractor for the health care site has been saying that it's not their fault because the CMS should have tested the program far earlier than it did. Funny, when I hire a contractor for something, I would expect them to do the testing. I suspect a lot of IT contractors know the various components of the systems they develop but haven't perfected how to make them work together smoothly. It's like driving a stagecoach using a team of wild tigers, or giant cockroaches, instead of horses -- we don't know how to control tigers or cockroaches.
I think this all makes clear why it's nuts for Congress to be calling for HHS Secretary Sebelius's resignation. They should criticize her more legitimately, perhaps, if she had been devoting her management time to overseeing details of work far below her pay grade, where the contractor was expected to have the expertise. Besides, let's imagine what kind of a website Congress would design, if it tried...