Privatization and the Affordable Care Act
Truth Out has the article Privatization and the Affordable Care Act. Of course the article is talking about contracting the design and implementation of the ACA web site to a private company.
Following award, there must be proper oversight of a contract. Once an agency has decided to privatize IT work, it often loses in-house expertise capable of contract oversight. There is simply more money to be made by working for contractors. Even the Defense Department, with the Defense Contract Management Agency devoted to this task, had a hard time finding the oversight people for the vast increase in service contracts in the past 20 years.
Since the Reagan administration, privatization has been the preferred way to provide services, such as IT, in the government. The problems with implementation of the Affordable Care Act highlight the ways in which this policy can go wrong. Opponents of the act will use its IT problems as a way to attack the progressive goal of providing greater access to health care to those who cannot afford necessary insurance. It will be cruelly ironic if the conservative policy of privatization will, by failing, further another conservative goal of restricting access to health care.
In a previous post, What Would You Ask To Investigate the ACA Website Debacle?, I tried to layout the questions I would ask based on what I have learned about software projects from a 40 year career doing software development and management. That post touches on some of the issues highlighted in the Truth Out article.