>Accenture, which is one of the world’s largest consulting firms, has extensive experience with computer systems on the state level, and it built California’s new health insurance exchange.
Hasn't California's exchange had big problems too?
Accenture is Arthur Andersen, and they've got a long history of extracting maximum value for shareholders from government contracts (state and local).
EDIT:
Arthur Andersen spawned Andersen Consulting spawned Arthur Anderson Business Consulting spawned Accenture. Some of AABC splintered off and joined Hitachi Consulting, some went elsewhere.
The history of computer consulting is varied, interesting, and tragic.
The website for California's exchange is still broken; it's broken so badly that the customer support phone # the site tells you to call is outright rejecting calls (lots of people having issues). You get a recorded message saying that due to high call volumes you should (slightly paraphrased) go fuck yourself and use the nonfunctional website.
They have an online chat queue for customer support that's similarly busted; you sit in the queue for hours with the ETA randomly changing before it says you've been booted out of the queue.
California exchange site sucked big time at the start and still sucks, but I've heard stories of people I know that actually signed up there. So compared to healthcare.gov it works better. Compared to normal proper site it's a disaster (or at least was couple of months ago when I last checked) but I guess good enough for government work.
Comments
Hasn't California's exchange had big problems too?
Accenture is Arthur Andersen, and they've got a long history of extracting maximum value for shareholders from government contracts (state and local).
EDIT:
Arthur Andersen spawned Andersen Consulting spawned Arthur Anderson Business Consulting spawned Accenture. Some of AABC splintered off and joined Hitachi Consulting, some went elsewhere.
The history of computer consulting is varied, interesting, and tragic.
The website for California's exchange is still broken; it's broken so badly that the customer support phone # the site tells you to call is outright rejecting calls (lots of people having issues). You get a recorded message saying that due to high call volumes you should (slightly paraphrased) go fuck yourself and use the nonfunctional website.
They have an online chat queue for customer support that's similarly busted; you sit in the queue for hours with the ETA randomly changing before it says you've been booted out of the queue.
I've always been under the impression that accenture were a "bums on seats" consultancy, graduates cranking out low quality java code.
California exchange site sucked big time at the start and still sucks, but I've heard stories of people I know that actually signed up there. So compared to healthcare.gov it works better. Compared to normal proper site it's a disaster (or at least was couple of months ago when I last checked) but I guess good enough for government work.