In the aftermath of the healthcare.gov disaster in 2013, armchair quarterbacks from all corners offered their reasons for the failure. Some thought the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) had spent its budget too slowly. Others said the problem was that CMS had tried to be its own \u201csystems integrator\u201d and should have charged CGI Federal \u2014 the lead company on healthcare.gov, the website that administered the health insurance exchanges mandated by the Affordable Care Act \u2014 with pulling all the pieces together. Still others thought that CGI and the dozens of other vendors involved were the real problem. (Indeed, the absence of truly basic functionality like site monitoring software suggests some serious deficiencies on their part.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A report by the Office of Inspector General offers ten key reasons for the disaster, spanning everything from lack of clear leadership and an overly bureaucratic culture to failures of integration, communication, execution, and oversight. The report is thorough, but that\u2019s a broad diagnosis. If I had to pick just one thing that maybe, just maybe, would have made a difference, it would be this: the site had a lot of project managers but no product manager. <\/p>\n\n\n\n