Medicare Still Runs on Massive COBOL Systems
dfinke · x · 2026-07-14
This post points out that the US Medicare claims system runs on 18 million lines of Assembly and COBOL code, carrying 50 years of policy logic.
The author adds that many engineers who wrote this code have long retired, speculating whether Wall Street relies on similarly massive legacy systems. The underlying point is that the maintenance cost of critical infrastructure often stems from aging code and institutional knowledge loss.
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