It seems to me, as one who has worked in the IT industry, that the architecture of the insurance company systems should have served as models. In other words, United Healthcare, which processes massive amounts of data and information for healthcare providers.....why didn't the government simply buy their application designs, data flows, and utilize their technologies in the Obamacare system? I've read accounts from several insurance firms which are redirecting applicants to their own websites where users are able to look at their health plans and decide if those are acceptable.
The Federal Government suffers from the American Airlines syndrome prevalent in the 90s: if it aint designed here, we don't want it. I was on the IBM sales team that served AA then, and their Sabre division insisted on designs from scratch, as if there were no other working models similar that they could adopt and tweak. Sabre was the first, and the best, and they wouldn't look at any others.
There's nothing new under the sun. The healthcare insurance industry operates massive systems that work, and work well. Buying and adopting proven technology is ALWAYS less expensive and easier to change and test than designing and coding from scratch.
