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This is GabFest Extra. What went wrong with Healthcare.gov?

I'm John Dickerson in our DC studio, and although, of course, we'll be talking about this topic on the regular GabFest this week, we wanted to go a little deeper into the specifics of the technical fiasco.

Joining me is David Auerbach, a software engineer in New York, who's been writing about this issue brilliantly for Slate.

Welcome to the show, David.

Hi. Thanks for having me.

David, I want to start with Kathleen Sibelius, the secretary of HHS, who is testifying

this week on the Hill about health care.gov and its problems. What did you take away from that?

That she was much better prepared than the contractors who testified last week. There wasn't a lot

of new information that I could glean from it about the technical problems of healthcare.gov.

The most interesting thing she said that I mentioned in my column, because it was in her testimony as well, that was released on Tuesday night, was that some of the contractors had indeed not met expectations, referring to some of the main contractors who had worked on the technical side of health care.gov.

Now, when somebody says that in your experience, so the only experience I have here is from, you know, when you're building a house, there's this dance that goes on where the contractor blames the architect and the architect blames the contractor.

And this is a dance that they go through,

and it's kind of predictable. When she said that, did that signify something to you specific

based on your experience in putting together software? I was expecting that the contractors would

certainly at least get some of the blame, but Sebelius did not do the full-on blame shifting

that we saw the contractors

engage in last week, where the representatives from QSSI and CGI Federal, two of the main

contractors, both attempted to say that neither of them were at fault at all, and that the

entire responsibility for the fiasco fell on the government and specifically on the center for Medicaid and Medicare services.

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