Jeff Zients, the former OMB Director in charge of overseeing fixes in the "healthcare.gov" / Affordable Care Act website is saying that the website will be up and running "smoothly" by the end of November. That's certainly encouraging, given the pent-up demand for affordable health insurance in the 36 states that don't have state-managed insurance exchanges (all Rethug states, by the way). Let's hope his projection is correct.
There will be time for a post-mortem on the flawed roll-out, but it's hard to grasp the incompetence of not performing a test run of the system beforehand, or the design flaws that resulted in the system crashing for most users. HHS Secretary Sebelius will have to face very rough questioning next week before Congress (much of it political point-scoring on the part of Rethugs, who want the system to fail anyway). But it's an object lesson in basic project management: know the dimensions of what you're procuring, know how to measure progress, and know when course corrections are necessary.
