Massachusetts dumping health insurance website contractor

Massachusetts is dumping the contractor that created the state’s dysfunctional online health insurance marketplace and may hire a new company to fix the Health Connector website, a top state official said Monday.

“We have made the decision we’re going to be parting ways with CGI,” said Sarah Iselin, who was hired recently by Governor Deval Patrick to oversee repairs to the website, which hasn’t worked properly since it was launched last October. The state has scrambled since then to sign up thousands of residents for health insurance that meets the requirements of the federal Affordable Care Act., resorting to using paper applications.

The state was granted an extension of the enrollment deadline from the end of March to June 30, but Iselin said at a meeting of the Health Connector board that the state plans to ask the federal government for another extension because it won’t be able to meet the June 30 deadline.

The state now hopes to have a functioning website for next fall’s enrollment period for coverage beginning in 2015.

I am a “website contractor” and have also managed many other contractors (some major names though not CGI) on projects for very large companies.

There are a lot of “sub-optimal” (to put it nicely) contractors out there and in general the bigger they are the less capable the individuals working on the project will be. But, if the employer is dysfunctional, you will probably not get a good product no matter how good the contractor is. My guess is there is a combination of dysfunctional “employers” and sub-optimal contractors involved in most of these exchanges.

I’ve gone 6 months on a 9 month contract making things up because the employer can’t tell me what they want the web site to do (but they’re paying me and the sub contractors so we build something). It’s worked out well before when the employer likes what we built but also not so well.

I’ve also gotten through 6 months (multiple man-years) meeting the written requirements only to find out that some other thing (unwritten and I’ve never heard it mentioned) is really “the key to the web site” and “why haven’t you done that yet”? Even better when they follow that statement up with “I knew it would be simple so I didn’t think I needed to mention it before”. Just because you see that feature every day at Amazon (or a porn site) doesn’t mean it’s “simple”.

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