Obamacare has a tech problem, and the U.S. government is enlisting the elite arm of the tech community to help fix it.
Big tech firms like Google, Oracle and Red Hat are sending some of their best and brightest to help the Obama administration with its rocky launch of the Obamacare health plan exchange websites, according to Bloomberg. The sites have suffered from numerous issues, including glitches, outages and more. Many have reported that they were unable to sign up for an insurance plan even after visiting healthcare.gov multiple times.
Starting on October 20th, the Obama administration began to talk about implementing a “tech surge” in an effort to get the Obamacare internet based exchanges up and running. When used by U.S. government officials, the term “surge” has typically been associated with the escalation of military operations by putting more troops on the ground. This tech surge aims to put tech boots on the ground to help make Obamacare, President Obama’s signature legislative achievement since being elected in 2008, a success.
Among those tapped to help the U.S. government with the Obamacare issues are Mikey Dickerson, who according to this LinkedIn profile is a Site Reliability Engineer at Google and Greg Gershman, the Director of Innovation at Mobomo LLC, according to his LinkedIn page.
When speaking before Congress earlier this week, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius stated that the government is taking all measures to ensure that the health care exchange will be “optimally functioning” by the end of this month.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison had this to say on the matter: “As an information technology company we are doing everything we can to help.”
It remains to be seen whether the joint efforts between public and private entities can help make Obamacare functional for all Americans. Time will tell.
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