Ann Althouse finds it amazing that President Obama clearly understands why his campaign website was so effective and why the Obamacare website fails on so many levels, but can’t generalize that knowledge to the whole public/private sphere:
In yesterday’s interview with Chuck Todd, Obama said:
You know, one of the lessons — learned from this whole process on the website — is that probably the biggest gap between the private sector and the federal government is when it comes to I.T. …
Well, the reason is is that when it comes to my campaign, I’m not constrained by a bunch of federal procurement rules, right?
That is, many have pointed out that his campaign website was really good, so why didn’t that mean that he’d be good at setting up a health insurance website? The answer is that the government is bad because the government is hampered by… government!
And how we write — specifications and — and how the — the whole things gets built out. So part of what I’m gonna be looking at is how do we across the board, across the federal government, leap into the 21st century.
I love the combination of: 1. Barely able to articulate what the hell happens inside these computer systems, and 2. Wanting to leap!
Because when it comes to medical records for veterans, it’s still done in paper. Medicaid is still largely done on paper.
When we buy I.T. services generally, it is so bureaucratic and so cumbersome that a whole bunch of it doesn’t work or it ends up being way over cost.
This should have made him sympathetic to the way government burdens private enterprise, but he’s focused on liberating government to take over more of what has been done privately. And yet there’s no plan, no idea about what would suddenly enable government to displace private businesses competing to offer a product people want to buy.
