patrick.net

http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/23/technology/obamacare-website-fix/index.html

Experts say the major problems with the Obamacare website can't reasonably be solved before the end of 2013, and the best fix would be to start over from scratch.

After assessing the website, Dave Kennedy, the CEO of information-security company Trusted Sec, estimates that about 20% of Healthcare.gov needs to be rewritten. With a whopping 500 million lines of code, according to a recent New York Times report, Kennedy believes fixing the site would probably take six months to a year.

"We don't even know where all of the problems lie, so how can we solve them?" Bhalla said. "It's like a drive-by shooting: You're going fast and you might hit it, you might miss it. But you can't fix what you can't identify."

Several computer engineers said it would likely be easier to rebuild Healthcare.gov than to fix the issues in the current system. But it's unlikely that the government would toss out more than $300 million worth of work.

To put 500 million lines of code into perspective, it took just 500,000 lines of code to send the Curiosity rover to Mars. Microsoft's (MSFT, Fortune 500) Windows 8 operating system reportedly has about 80 million lines of code. And an online banking system might feature between 75 million and 100 million lines. A "more normal range" for a project like Healthcare.gov is about 25 million to 50 million lines of code, Kennedy said.

25 to 50 million lines of code? It would not take even 1 million if done right. A million lines of code is a hell of a lot in today's programming platforms.

That might not be a major issue now, as people are still having trouble logging onto the site. But once it's up and running, that code had better be made more secure.

"At this point, the car isn't even moving," Bhalla said. "But once we're speeding down the road, you're going to want that seatbelt to work."

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