HHS brings in Verizon to help HealthCare.gov

Verizon has been tasked with helping the government fix the federal health exchange.

It makes sense for the Department of Health and Human Services to seek Verizon's help, said Aneesh Chopra, the Obama administration's former chief technology officer and now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. "There is an existing 'best and brightest' available to call in," Chopra said. "Verizon is one of those already under contract." The odds that the problem will be fixed are "50-50," said Clark Kelso, California's chief information officer under governors Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger. "They've got a short window here to try to fix things," Kelso said. "Simply throwing a lot of new programmers at something like this does not guarantee success."