How the failure of Healthcare.gov kickstarted US government transformation

The 2013 launch of healthcare.gov – the US government website that helps American’s find health insurance – is most often viewed as a failure. The website crashed on its first day, leading to batch of negative headlines as the US government scrambled to get it back online. 

But this is only half the story. What is less remembered now is the recovery – how government changed how it worked to get the system working and then spread the lessons across the federal government.  

In this episode of Government Transformed, Siobhan Benita speaks to Aaron Snow, faculty fellow at Georgetown University in the Beck Center for Social Impact and innovation, about what it means for governments to achieve digital transformation with public good at its core – from his work helping turn round healthcare.gov and beyond. 

Aaron has been named one of the world's 20 most influential people in digital government. In this interview, he recounts to Siobhan his leadership journey through the digital public service landscape.  

Starting as a Presidential Innovation Fellow (PIF) in 2012, Aaron became one of the founding members of 18F an organisation set up as a digital expertise arm of the General Services Administration (GSA) to transform public services across America after the problems with healthcare.gov.    

In this candid conversation, Aaron shares his insight on what it is like to drive digital change across government from this organisation, as well as the day when an organisational restructure moved 18F from a discreet operation into a much larger outfit – and what this meant for its work. On a practical level Aaron details the daunting challenges he and his colleagues faced were dauting – like having to “design a plane while building it, while flying it”. 

He says the stress of leading in such a high-pressure environment seems “pretty natural in retrospect”.  “I didn't know what I was feeling [at the time] because I hadn't been through that before, not at that level,” he adds.  

In this exclusive podcast, Snow shares his reflections on working in government – from the startup culture of 18F to the bureaucratic obstacles – what he calls the symphony of incentives and requirements that push on people who are trying to improve government service experiences for the public. 

He emphasises the need for leaders to foster and protect a strong, innovative team culture. He highlights the importance of having regular conversations with people at every level of an organisation so that every competing need, incentive and requirement is fulfilled. 

He also reflects on his time leading the Canadian Digital Service, and his work now as a fellow at the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation at Georgetown University, where he divides his time between the Digital Service Network and the Intergovernmental Software Collaborative.  

Listen to the episode in full here. 

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