Above: A screenshot of the HealthCare.gov website.
Everyone knows that the “Obamacare website,” or HealthCare.gov, performed so badly at launch that it became a political Achilles Heal for POTUS.
Well, the White House has just put up the posting to search for the next keeper of the online face of the government’s health insurance plan exchange.
A contract solicitation was posted on Wednesday, with an application deadline of August 18. It describes he necessary requirements for the winning firm— the main one, of course, being the ability to keep HealthCare.gov up and running.
The 60-page job requisition document says the new contractor will have to work “under aggressive time constraints” to test and upgrade the hardware, software, and security apparatus behind the site.
And, of course, the new contractor will have to have a solid plan for load-testing the site, to make sure it won’t go down just when lots of people are trying to sign up for health insurance.
Accenture won a one-year, no-bid contract to run Healthcare.gov last January. The firm could apply to run the site for another year if it chooses.
The first contractor hired to run the site, CGI Federal, was ousted after Healthcare.gov failed under heavy traffic at launch last October.
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