Infosys should offer to fix Healthcare.gov for free

It would be a good idea for Infosys to offer to remove the glitches that have blighted US President Barack Obama’s flagship programme, the Affordable Healthcare Act. It should offer its services for free, as a gesture of goodwill to the American people. It would serve three purposes simultaneously. It would allow Obamacare to take off as it was planned to, setting off one of the largest healthcare reform projects in the world, benefiting millions of people and the US government. Further, such a gesture would allow Infosys, which is putting up a brave face after paying a $34-million fine for civil violations of US immigration laws, to turn the other cheek in style. And finally, it would act as a fine technology demonstrator for Indian capability in the field.

The US government’s healthcare.gov website just hasn’t been able to handle the volume of traffic after it went live for people to register and buy insurance. The sequence of transactions required by the website to buy insurance was not particularly efficient and contributed to avoidable build-up of simultaneous traffic on the site. A data centre failed, to boot. In short, the IT-enabling of a reasonably straightforward concept has turned out to be deeply flawed. This is precisely the kind of thing Indian IT companies are good at sorting out, only if they are allowed to. The Obama administration has been pursuing a buy-American line and has been averse to outsourcing government work to offshore service providers. If Infosys were to offer its services for free, it would be difficult for the US government to turn that offer down on economic grounds, without seeming to be churlish.

If a large Indian IT company were to contribute to making Obamacare work, or even just make a credible offer of help, it would bring credibility to several areas: project design and execution capability of Indian IT firms, the positive role foreign companies and their workforce, including migrants, play and the superior benefits of outsourcing viewed as specialisation rather than merely as cost-cutting. Go for it, Infosys.