Government Taps Engineers From Google, Red Hat To Fix Healthcare.gov

The government has tapped engineers at Google, Oracle, and Red Hat, among other companies, to assist in untangling the problems with its online health insurance marketplace. The site, a key part of President Barack Obama's healthcare reform effort, has numerous bugs that have prevented Americans from signing up for health insurance.

Michael Dickerson, a site reliability engineer on leave from Google, is among the experts recruited by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency responsible for the site. Dickerson will be working with QSSI, the contractor that has been put in charge of fixing the problems with the site by November 30th.

Dickerson will be "leveraging his experience stabilizing large, high throughput applications to improve HealthCare.gov's reliability and performance," the agency announced today. His participation does not mean his employer is involved with the effort. (Google declined to comment.)