Rescuing HealthCare.gov 🔗

Days after the disastrous initial launch of HealthCare.gov in October 2013, I was asked by the White House to be part of a small new team of technologists to figure out what was wrong with the site and come up with a plan to fix it. Led by U.S. CTO Todd Park, we dove deep into the heart of the site, working alongside the contractors and government agencies who had built it. When we realized the scope and scale of the effort required to turn it around, the stakes if it failed, and the fact that it could be saved, we dropped everything we were doing and spent the next several months working 16 hour days, seven days a week to rescue the site. As 2013 and then the initial open enrollment period drew to a close, enormous progress had been made, and the site was able to enroll millions of Americans in affordable health coverage, many for the first time in their lives. The blow-by-blow story of how this happened has best been told so far by a cover story in TIME magazine by Stephen Brill.