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The client contracts with the manufacturer to develop and install a system. The project starts. The completion date slips. It keeps slipping. Each time the adjusted delivery date approaches, the project slips yet again. At some point, one of three things happens: the manufacturer/vendor abandons the project; the client cancels the project; or the manufacturer delivers a system that the client terms wholly inadequate and unacceptable. In some cases, the effort has gone on for years, with millions of dollars spent and little to show for it.
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The comments and leaks coming out from a hundred sources make it pretty clear that this project was going to face a disastrous launch, particularly with the insistence on an October 1 go-live date. Furthermore, it is also becoming clear that the problems with the architecture, design, implementation and testing of Healthcare.gov are so fundamental and deep that the current system many never work satisfactorily — that it may, in fact, be infected with “septic” code, design, etc. I believe this was known by many inside the project, and yet it went live on October 1st anyway — truly wishful, or if you will, magic, thinking.
Magic thinking is, of course, a very common phenomenon of the Left, for all their claims of being more “rational” and “scientific” and “objective” than the Right. You can see it in their beliefs that the passage of Obamacare and their own good intentions and righteous cause would somehow negate the laws of economics, psychology, biology, medicine, and unintended consequences. What is happening with Healthcare.gov is that same magic thinking phenomenon in a very public, mechanistic, and immediately testable environment. Even the media is losing its ability and desire to cover for the spectacular failure going on.