White House Brings in Google Talent to Fix Obamacare Site

Part of 'tech surge'

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Mark Lennihan / AP

An engineer on leave from Google is among the dozens of developers and analysts the Obama administration has brought in to fix its problem-plagued health insurance website.

Michael Dickerson, a Site Reliability Engineer with Google, has “expertise in diving into any layer of the tech stack, from the metal to the application code to the people that write it,” the Department of Health and Human Services, which is overseeing the Obamacare rollout, announced Thursday in a blog post revealing just some of the talent it promised in a “tech surge” to fix the site.

Others in the White House dream team include developers, designers and analysts from Red Hat, Oracle, CGI, and the general contractor QSSI.

Since it’s launch on Oct. 1, Healthcare.gov has been plagued by serious technical failures that have frustrated many people trying to use the site to purchase health insurance through the federal health insurance exchange. Obamacare critics have pointed to the website’s shortcomings as an example of flaws throughout the Affordable Care Act.