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Out of curiosity - What would be the difficulties in having government services like this be offered as "api-only" from the government's side, and allowing open

Out of curiosity - What would be the difficulties in having government services like this be offered as "api-only" from the government's side, and allowing open competition for interfaces and other interaction? What difficulties would there be from the government's perspective, what issues would the companies experience when trying to create the interfaces and portals, and what issues would pop up for the users of the services?

lesuorac 3y ago
You would need to allocate taxes to do that and also taxes on maintenance. This solution didn't need any investment from the USG.
sh1mmer 3y ago
I think this is conceptually a great idea, especially for viewing data. However as soon as you start asking people for money (for reservations) then it becomes a big fraud risk if the UI isn’t on a known same domain (such as something.gov).
mcmcmc 3y ago
Because government services have to be accessible to everyone. An API is not “accessible” to most people.
HDThoreaun 3y ago
This site was commissioned in the wake of the obamacare market roll out which was an absolute cluster fuck. The idea was basically "ok so it turns out we're completely incapable of building a website without it falling over once we turn it on, lets let the private sector do it and incentivize them to make it good by letting them charge a fee when people use it". So I guess the difficult is that whoever came up with this website didn't believe the government could deliver it. Also thad the benefit of the site being free in terms of upfront costs.
- strbean 3y ago
  Well that's a hell of a scam, because contractors built the first rendition of HealthCare.gov that failed miserably: > Development of the website's interface as well as its supporting back-end services, to make sure that the website could work to help people compare between health insurance plans, were both outsourced to private companies. The front-end of the website was developed by the startup Development Seed. The back-end work was contracted out to CGI Federal Inc., a subsidiary of the Canadian IT Multinational corporation| CGI Group, which subcontracted the work to other companies, as is common on large government contracts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov This is particularly sad to me because this kind of thing should probably be a core competency of a modern government. The novel Jennifer Government lied to me :(

lesuorac 3y ago

You would need to allocate taxes to do that and also taxes on maintenance. This solution didn't need any investment from the USG.

sh1mmer 3y ago

I think this is conceptually a great idea, especially for viewing data. However as soon as you start asking people for money (for reservations) then it becomes a big fraud risk if the UI isn’t on a known same domain (such as something.gov).

mcmcmc 3y ago

Because government services have to be accessible to everyone. An API is not “accessible” to most people.

HDThoreaun 3y ago

This site was commissioned in the wake of the obamacare market roll out which was an absolute cluster fuck. The idea was basically "ok so it turns out we're completely incapable of building a website without it falling over once we turn it on, lets let the private sector do it and incentivize them to make it good by letting them charge a fee when people use it". So I guess the difficult is that whoever came up with this website didn't believe the government could deliver it. Also thad the benefit of the site being free in terms of upfront costs.

strbean 3y ago
Well that's a hell of a scam, because contractors built the first rendition of HealthCare.gov that failed miserably: > Development of the website's interface as well as its supporting back-end services, to make sure that the website could work to help people compare between health insurance plans, were both outsourced to private companies. The front-end of the website was developed by the startup Development Seed. The back-end work was contracted out to CGI Federal Inc., a subsidiary of the Canadian IT Multinational corporation| CGI Group, which subcontracted the work to other companies, as is common on large government contracts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov This is particularly sad to me because this kind of thing should probably be a core competency of a modern government. The novel Jennifer Government lied to me :(