11 ms·

We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

208 points by Yoms 13y ago

ck2 13y ago
If it really did cost over half a billion dollars for only 50k parallel connections, that is outrageous. It is hard to read/understand that spending breakdown, not sure what each 20-50 million dollar allotment is exactly for: http://usaspending.gov/explore?tab=By+Prime+Awardee&fiscal_year=all&idvpiid=HHSM500200700015I&typeofview=detailsummary http://usaspending.gov/explore?tab=By+Prime+Awardee&fiscal_y... Given how we can see the problem with this as developers, imagine what we don't understand about the 10 to 1 or even 100 to 1 overspending on the military and "defense" budget. Just imagine the TSA and "Homeland Security" waste.
- JPKab 13y ago
  It is truly an awful scenario. As I stated recently in a comment on this subject, Federal contracting is a Rent Seeking scenario: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking I have a weird role: I work at a company which does tons of Federal contracts, but also has lots of private sector work. I keep my sanity by doing short term consulting with private clients. There are some sharp people working the Federal side, but it really is awful. Winning a contract is EVERYTHING. It is a writing contest, and you can be sure that the Federal contract officer knows jack shit about the actual fundamentals of the project. The Contract Officer is a paper pusher whose job is to look at the line items in the Request for Proposal, and examine which company's proposal best "hits" each line item. And of course they will select a low bidder, which often is a bid too low for the company to even profit, simply meant to get their foot in the door. The staffing of these Federal contracts is horrific. You get entire teams of "change management" people. I'm currently assisting on a personnel system for a major military organization. I recently had to witness an entire discussion by the change management team on removing hyphens from a particular term to help the branding. I almost threw up in my mouth. The people I work with on the Fed contracts, in general, don't touch technology when they leave work. Therefore the only browser they use is IE8 (according to the customer org, it is more secure......) they do nothing outside of J2EE/.NET (usually just one of the two) and they HAVE/WILL never build a website that supports more than 5,000 enterprise users (concurrently). It is incredibly easy to look like a wizard amongst this bunch, but the experience of the Federal world has made me avoid these projects like the plague. The incentives at the business level (and therefore the high salary jobs) are ALL for winning contracts. Performing well on the work won is just viewed as another cost center.
  - dfc 13y ago
    There are some sharp people working the Federal side, but it really is awful. What are you referring to with "it"? The folks at your company who do federal IT work? Government IT employees? Federal IT consulting?
    - dfxm12 13y ago
      the parent post seems to be referring to bidding for & working with the federal government on government contracts.
      - dfc 13y ago
        The sentence is: "There are some sharp people working the Federal side, but it really is awful." The "it" section is after the comma and not part of its own sentence. Maybe you could (I wouldn't) make that inference if it read: "There are some sharp people working the Federal side. But it really is awful."
        enoch_r 13y ago
        It's similar to the sentence "Bob got a new girlfriend, but she is awful." "It" refers to "the Federal side."
        dfc 13y ago
        Federal side at OP's company (which OP is a member of) or in general?
    - cowsandmilk 13y ago
      I read "it" as a pronoun, not as "information technology"
      - dfc 13y ago
        Me too, I just can not figure out what the pronoun refers to. I am not sure why my request for clarification was down voted. I appreciated the comment and wanted to make sure I understood everything the OP was saying.
- smackfu 13y ago
  >It is hard to read/understand that spending breakdown, not sure what each 20-50 million dollar allotment is exactly for It's probably just a single contract with milestones that correspond to payments. Like "completed design" means they get 10%.
- 001sky 13y ago
  for only 50k parallel connections Its hard to win when you set the goals like this (low), too
- Shivetya 13y ago
  It cost 55.7 to launch the site, the six hundred million dollar number is the total of all their contracts.
grej 13y ago
Eisenhower warned about the military industrial complex. This is just the latest manifestation of the government-industrial complex. I'd be willing to bet that CGI Federal (the contractor) has some very well connected cronies to have captured this boondoggle.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
wikiburner 13y ago
Scaling on the web is basically a solved issue for sites with such limited functionality. Even the CIA is using AWS, so I can't believe the regulatory and security hurdles were prohibitive. To spend this kind of money on sites with these kinds of results is just disgraceful: "The site is so busted that, as of a couple days ago, the number of people that successfully purchased healthcare through it was in the 'single digits,' according to the Washington Post." http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505269_162-57606633/obamacare-website-looks-like-nobody-tested-it-programmer-says/ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505269_162-57606633/obamacare-we...
- josefresco 13y ago
  Beware of potentially politically motivated garbage quotes. The referenced Washington Post article quoted an "insurance industry official" who would only speak anonymously: “Very, very few people that we’re aware of have enrolled in the federal exchange,” said one insurance industry official, who like many in the industry, spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for possibly offending the Obama administration. “We are talking single digits.” So one guy allegedly in the "insurance industry" who won't give his name has said enrollment has been in the single digits. Not overall enrollment mind you, just what this one guy has seen come across his desk. But that's how this article has been spun. Millions of people! single digit success rate! as reported by "some guy". A sad state of affairs indeed.
  - sally84 13y ago
    You do realize people are purchasing Obamacare through those insurance companies, right?
  - wikiburner 13y ago
    How about the CBS video linked above? Or the links below? Or the countless other media accounts of the launch being a "complete disaster"? Or all the comments on this very page of HNers not being able to use the site? Not even the administration's biggest defenders are trying to spin this as a successful launch. Are you really implying the media as a whole is biased against Obama? http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505269_162-57606633/obamacare-website-looks-like-nobody-tested-it-programmer-says/ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505269_162-57606633/obamacare-we... http://bigstory.ap.org/article/poll-rollout-health-exchanges-gets-thumbs-down http://bigstory.ap.org/article/poll-rollout-health-exchanges... http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/some-say-health-care-sites-problems-highlight-flawed-federal-it-policies/2013/10/09/d558da42-30fe-11e3-8627-c5d7de0a046b_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/some-say-h...
ams6110 13y ago
Maybe it wasn't ever intended to work.
- swamp40 13y ago
  I'm pretty jaded w/r/t the fed gov, but I don't see where anyone gains here. People are so outraged that they call up their senator and demand...what? The only thing people will demand is that the website gets fixed ASAP, because they were looking for some affordable healthcare options.
dccoolgai 13y ago
This is absolutely nothing compared to what they waste on technology in DOD...
- devx 13y ago
  I'd be happy if they were actually "wasting it on technology", but this seems like corrupt money, going into the pockets of big corporations for very little and poor work. They probably charge at least 10x what it's worth on the market, and do work that is worse than the average on the market. It helps that the people signing these contracts are either clueless or don't care, since it's not their money.
Tloewald 13y ago
> the factors that play into which companies receive government contracts, a process called “procurement,” are fundamentally broken This.
- Osmium 13y ago
  How would you fix it? I could imagine a competitive process, e.g. pay a number of different companies to start producing their solution in parallel. And then at the end of 3 months, pick the one(s) that looks the most promising and pay them to continue with it. It sounds wasteful, but I just don't see a better way, because people seem incapable of judging beforehand which companies are actually capable of providing on their promises.
  - dexen 13y ago
    I'm all for it -- good old free market and whatnot, but... how exactly would one pick the most promissing project? Do we have any undisputable metric of project progress (both completeness and quality) yet? Would we judge competing projects by kLOC? By percentage of code coverage? By extensibility of architecture? By percentage of GUI widgets already laid yout (even if just mocked up)? Or perhaps by conformance to an arbitrary test suite -- which raises the good old `Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?' problem?
  - Tloewald 13y ago
    I think that this plus open source. If anything should be open source it's anything built for governments. I should note that the project I'm on did use this approach, but having picked winners it then proceeded to monkey with the teams constantly and generally screw everything up anyway.
  - mseebach 13y ago
    Generally: get government out of the business of procuring custom software and shift to procuring outcomes. Something like these healthcare exchanges should have been put to the market in a from where the revenue is directly tied to the end goal: The successful purchase of health insurance by customers (or whatever is the case here, I'm not intimately familiar with the mechanics). Have providers bid on the full thing by revenue pr. successful transaction + an SLA that deducts an appropriate penalty if it isn't met. Ideally, you don't even need to pick a winner, you can just say that any provider that successfully operates such a marketplace will get the revenue per transaction and let the market sort it out. End users will gravitate towards the sites that are fast and easy to use, "Consumer Reports" will test them etc. Lean, agile shops will win. Clunky, well-connected, but technically unsophisticated government contractors will fail.
gexla 13y ago
They should have opened the bidding process to Elance, they could have found someone to do the back-end for like 5K. ;) ETA: > And when things still go wrong, they simply throw “more money at the same people who caused the problem to fix the problem." For that much money, I could be a terrible web developer.
Nodex 13y ago
Not to mention its awful responsiveness. Just sayin ;)
SmileyKeith 13y ago
It definitely seems like the amount of money the government spends on projects like this starts out at something outrageous no matter how complex.
ashishbharthi 13y ago
Site just crashed my IE8. Generally I have had nicer experience with most sites developed under Obama administration like wh.gov and such.
Yoms 13y ago
Interestingly CGI is a Canadian company...
- CedarMadness 13y ago
  CGI Federal is run mostly independently to get around the laws preventing foreign companies from bidding on US government contracts. Source: I used to work there.
- blottsie 13y ago
  CGI is a Canadian company, but CGI Federal is a wholly-owned U.S. subsidiary.
pkorzeniewski 13y ago
I'll never understand how it's possible that government web sites cost so much, yet usually look like shit, work like shit and are easy to hack (at least in my country). I always get the feeling that companies that win the contracts are somehow related to people responsible for the decision, it's like "Hey, it's not our money, so let's milk the budget as much as possible!".
- RWeaver 13y ago
  It's because they're procured based on verifiable requirements, and yet there's no way to specify a verifiable requirement for user interaction. Security is almost the same. 'Must be secure!'. Unless they procure and schedule independent penetration testing and code audit (if they even get the code), the vendor is able to deliver insecure code with a horrible UI and still be 100% within the terms of the contract. The reason government doesn't do more agile is because the politics of the stakeholders can get crazy, with the end result being constantly shifting goal posts and nothing delivered. So they require Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS - give us something that already works), and yet due to the requirements... there's always significant customization required. I wish someone in government understood this : P
- BSousa 13y ago
  In Portugal, I know of about 5 systems that were developed by either companies of family members of politicians or by companies were one of the shareholders/owners were the decider on which company to use. The INEM (emergency response unit) hardware and software was sold by to INEM by the company the person deciding on which company to use created and then left INEM. Sorta went like Public Contest -> Manager creates company and submits project -> Manager chooses own company -> Manager quits INEM to 'work' at the new company. This is public knowledge but there isn't much we can do about it
- jon-wood 13y ago
  One of the few things I agree with our current government in the UK on is their move to bring government IT in house from external companies. That decision has led to Government Digital Services, who are building out http://gov.uk/ http://gov.uk/, and a few other digital departments within government. A friend of mine works at the Ministry of Justice, and told me recently he has the easiest job in the world, because even if he were to just sit at his desk and do nothing he'd be delivering a better service than the agencies that proceeded him, and saving the ministry huge amounts of money.
danso 13y ago
As has been noted on HN at the time, the front-facing part of the site was released as open-source 3 months ago: https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov You can deploy it like any other Jekyll site. The code and content has changed since then but I imagine it still has the same static front facing architecture, much like the Obama campaign fundraising site, which famously raised $250M using Jekyll static pages: http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-million-fundraising-platform/ http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-millio... So the number of raw visitors may not be the most relevant number, as many of them may have hit the front page and left, or never got around to the signup part. But what exactly was the technology in the back-end stack?
smoyer 13y ago
Imagine what this community could build with more than half a billion dollars!
- arbuge 13y ago
  It is easy to see that. What's needed is somebody to shake up the whole government contract procurement system. A gigantic schlep right there...
  - smoyer 13y ago
    Very true ... how do you fit that into the 3 months before demo day? I'm seeing a system that contains a complete list of government contractors/sub-contractors (this actually exists today). For each company, a list of verified skills (a proven track record) would allow a procurement agent to narrow the field, and a reputation system that let's the cream rise to the top. I'm not sure it would be feasible to track the employees that make up a company as that's pretty fluid (on the time-scale of government contracts), but in the software field, you could (for instance) sum the reputation of the company's developers stack-overflow profiles. Obviously, a lot more thought is required!
- anarchitect 13y ago
  Take a look at what the GDS is doing here in the UK. * hire really smart people with up-to-date views on technology [1] * build on, and release new open source [2] [1] https://www.gov.uk/designprinciples https://www.gov.uk/designprinciples [2] https://github.com/alphagov https://github.com/alphagov
  - quickpost 13y ago
    That is really cool. Thanks for posting.
- pyre 13y ago
  Half of an Instagram!
dkhenry 13y ago
Good thing we are giving the federal government control over the healthcare system ( and positioning them to take even more control as we move towards single payer ). I am sure they won't screw it up like they have the the roll out of this small portion of the system. Also I am really looking forwards to the day I can't get my kid seen by a doctor because there was a budget fight and the government shut down.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- pyre 13y ago
  Think how stupid both sides will look if actual deaths can be attributed to their political posturing over fiscal matters. E.g. "Little Jimmy died because he couldn't get essential treatment. How can you try to make that ok by saying that you were both playing chicken, but the 'other guy' should have backed down?"
- k-mcgrady 13y ago
  >> "Also I am really looking forwards to the day I can't get my kid seen by a doctor because there was a budget fight and the government shut down." Do you not think that doctors would be one of the essential personal not effected by a shutdown? And do you seriously believe the US would completely ban private medical care? We have the NHS (free health care for everyone) but we also still have privatised care which you can choose to pay for if you want. It's 2013 and the US still doesn't provide free health care for its citizens. Pigs will fly before they not only do that, but ban private care.
- chadwickthebold 13y ago
  The affordable care act mandates people get health coverage, prevents denial of coverage due to pre-existing conditions, provides centralized services to purchase health coverage, and expands federal programs for medicare and medicaid. Your local doctor isn't going to refuse to see you because they are still paid by an insurance company, and not the federal government.
djim 13y ago
this is an absurd waste of taxpayer money. we shouldn't let the government and their contractors get away with this sort of robbery. it is no wonder we are so far in debt as a nation.
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
Political organizations exist for political reasons. So if you get elected to "do something" about orphans, you'll create an organization to do something. The goal of this organization is political: appear to be making progress on the orphan problem. At the very least, do not appear in the news as an example of government waste. The current website problem is a political failure -- it looks bad. But that's just a short term consideration. The long-term bet is that over the next decades, the ACA will bring great political benefit to the political party that supported it, no matter what other things it does. So when we evaluate projects created by political organizations for political reasons, the success criteria is much different than commercial or non-profit projects. I don't think this is a failure. Maybe a bump in the road, but it's nothing that won't work itself out over the next year or so. (And be long forgotten) Remember, a lot of government contractors made money building these sites. A lot of people had jobs. A lot of committees and functionaries are able to add this to their list of good they've done in the world. Not being able to actually use the site for a while is a small pittance compared to the real, measured benefit the sites have created. So far. If it drags on for a long time, the political math could switch around the other way, but I doubt it.
- 001sky 13y ago
  The problem with this logic is that carte balche on an amex is no way to run a government, even if every dime spent is sucessful in "keeping you in power". To the extent that one is rationalizing the status quo, it is pointing out the obvious. Unfortunately, the math no longer works and the system is going to be reset as someone else has to pick up the tab. It may be republicans or it may be your children. But whomever gets stuck with the bills is going to be pissed off, methinks. Part of being a successful politician is not creating deep-seated enenimities.
  - DanielBMarkham 13y ago
    When the U.S. was founded, slavery was a key concern. Jefferson and others knew that slavery couldn't last, but there was no way to get agreement on it. So what did they do? They left the problem to future generations to solve. And the result involved a lot of bloodshed. In any system of government, there's always going to be a strong desire to kick problems down the road for somebody else to solve. I think the best we can hope for is some structures in place to minimize this, but you'll never get rid of it completely. What we see now is just 250 years or so of this thinking, with the default solution of letting somebody else handle it growing more powerful with each passing year.
malaporte 13y ago
A colleague of mine used to be some kind of manager/director at that company (in another country though). He once described his former job as "milking the government". They hire the lowest quality engineers (e.g. the cheapest), and then bill them outlandish $/hour to work for government agencies. The project plans are packed with useless stuff, and are designed to exceed initial estimations. They get paid by the hour...
zachrose 13y ago
There are a lot of interesting things to say about a $634M website that didn’t work when it should have, but what pops out at me here is the description of “poorly written code.” This article even links directly to some of the code, which A) looks fine? and B) is like “Yeah, the problem wasn’t with procurement regulations or clear requirements or public-private cronyism or managerial competence, it was that damn person who told the computer what to do and the computer didn’t do the right thing.”
- joshuahedlund 13y ago
  Here is my personal experience with some of that "poorly written" code: http://www.postlibertarian.com/2013/10/yes-the-obamacare-website-really-is-really-bad/ http://www.postlibertarian.com/2013/10/yes-the-obamacare-web... > the text on the sign-up page, the front-end javascript validation on the sign-up page, and the text on the help page all have different requirements for valid usernames in the database!
  - penguat 13y ago
    That sounds like poor BA/spec work. BA asks: "what do we need from this username". BA should ask "what do we need from usernames overall"? It's always going to be hard to be agile on federal contracts - there're too many customers to really get a clear view from them.
    - joshuahedlund 13y ago
      A fair point. Other examples of problems were empty drop-down menus from presumably non-cached failed DB accesses[0] and forgot password links in emails leading to an error about no match found for the provided information [me], which I suppose you could respectively file under 'unexpected heavy load' and 'bug' rather than 'poorly written code', though at some point no matter how you classify the problems it makes me nervous to submit my information because I wonder what security holes are waiting to be discovered along with the other problems. [0]http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-02/untangling-obamacare-s-web-glitches.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-02/untangling-obamacar...
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
jmarin 13y ago
has anyone here actually attempted to use the site, or just reading about how it fails? The only commenter I've read was using IE. I just signed up and had no problems.
- WesleyJohnson 13y ago
  I tried signing up the day it launched and ran into issues with 404s. After 3 or 4 days, I was finally able to create an account. When I went back the following day to login for the first time to choose a plan, I couldn't login. I get a message saying my login credentials are incorrect. I hit the forgot password link and enter in my username. It finds my account and sends me a password reset email. I click on the link in the password reset email and it takes me back to healthcare.gov with an error message that my account can't be found, which obviously makes no sense because they just used my account to send me an email. Live Chat has provided zero help, only stating that it's probably a performance issue and to try back later. One odd thing is that the registration page says you a need a lower case and upper case character, a number and at least one symbol from a pre-defined set. To my knowledge, I didn't use an uppercase character, nor do I use one when do the password reset, which properly sends me an email. I feel like maybe the login portion is properly validating the username requirements, but the registration didn't which is what has left me in this mess. Sorry, this site isn't worth $600 million.
twrkit 13y ago
So this is what $634mm gets you? https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/registration.js https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/registra...
mark_l_watson 13y ago
I lost my group health plan, which I had for fifteen years, recently so I has experienced the web site first hand :-) My latest complaint: I logged in many times last week to fill in information, a bit at a time before I lost access. Then starting Sunday morning I could no longer login. On the phone last night I was told that they had wiped all stored passwords and to follow the "I don't remember my password" link. Couldn't they have posted that as a huge banner message and let people know? I had four days of frustration trying to login. Then, when I got the reset password link, and followed it, one of the profile verification questions they asked for resetting my password WAS A QUESTION THAT I HAD NOT BEEN ASKED so I had no way to answer it. I wrote down my profile questions so I am fairly sure of this. wTF
- hga 13y ago
  Strange, it was national news they'd wiped all passwords ... as you say, we can't imagine why that wasn't in a banner message.
- nutate 13y ago
  To play devils advocate, have you tried logging into Aetna, Cigna, Blue Cross Blue Shield, etc recently? Just as fucked in terms of passwords being screwed, lockouts, other such nonsense.
  - Raphael 13y ago
    No, but I've signed in to Facebook, Google, Reddit, etc. It's a solved problem.
    - nutate 13y ago
      Most cutting edge computer science folks like to make money selling ads not selling cheap insurance.
  - Raphael 13y ago
    No, but I've signed in to Facebook, Google, Reddit, etc. It's a solved problem.
tokenadult 13y ago
National Public Radio had a good report on 8 October 2013, "Health Exchange Tech Problems Point To A Thornier Issue," http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/10/08/230424841/health-exchange-tech-problems-point-to-a-thornier-issue http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/10/08/230424... that discusses the broader issue of United States federal government contracting for information technology services. Some reforms are suggested in that story that would help more competent startup companies compete against the established federal contractors that win most of the big contracts. The specialized skill that the incumbents bring to the contracting process is not specialized skill in data-processing or programming for federal agencies, but rather specialized skill in navigating the federal bureaucracy for bidding on federal contracts.
- puller 13y ago
  The difference between established federal contractors and startups disappears if startups get federal contracts. I know a lot of startups would like a better shot at that cash, but if the problem is in the incentives then it's no help to get different people doing the same things. If there are already problems with how federal contracts are awarded, it is hard to imagine that wholesale deregulation is going to result in a more selective process. For example, blind removal of lowest-bidder requirements would make larger-scale corruption even easier. There are legitimate complaints and federal contracting needs work, but what kind of work? Let's not underestimate how much worse we can make it. The money on the table is ample incentive for people to propose innocent-sounding reforms which really just open up the taps or redirect them to different parties rather than increasing efficiency.
  - mgkimsal 13y ago
    Having a scoring system that takes in to account how many previous govt projects have gone over budget and over time would help. Yes, small company X might not have a track record, and might end up folding in 2 years (especially if they can't get decent sized contracts to stay in business), but is that necessarily any worse than bigcoXYZ getting contract, then taking 3 years longer than proposed and going 400% over budget? Look at the track record of the company, and use that in factoring in contract awards. Companies that routinely go over budget and over time should be penalized by having a reduced chance of getting contracts in the first place. That's one thing that would help level the playing field a bit. Of course, what would happen is those larger companies would create related spin-offs that are technically not related, and they'd have 'fresh' stats to compete with, and the cycle would start over again, probably.
mploi123 13y ago
I have worked with IT consulting for the government (in Brazil), and if the software needs of the american government are similar to the Brazilian ones, you can't compare twitter, instagram, etc. with this! They are completely different kinds of software, governmental softwares have tons of integration with old COBOL systems that runs millions of sensible data, and tons of requirements, really, pages and pages of different use case scenarios. Governmental software require more man-hours than successful start ups, even when they work and succeed as a project. The "MVP" of a governmental system is huge. Now, don't get me wrong. the price is absurd, this example is clearly a total failure. It's just that this article compare apples to oranges.
jzwinck 13y ago
I told https://www.healthcare.gov/ https://www.healthcare.gov/ that I want to apply and live in New York. It immediately gave me a link to http://nystateofhealth.ny.gov/ http://nystateofhealth.ny.gov/ . I clicked the link, and it says: > Access Denied > You don't have permission to access "http://nystateofhealth.ny.gov/" http://nystateofhealth.ny.gov/" on this server. Why would the top level of such a site have permissions at all?
- cjrandolph 13y ago
  It works now. It was an oversight with their SSL registration. The link given to the feds was www. Which worked. They just omitted the www.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
knodi 13y ago
Who is in-charge for healthcare.org? What company?
- nitid_name 13y ago
  CGI Federal. Please read the articles.
nhebb 13y ago
I'm less concerned about the short term scalability issues as I am about the long term security and privacy issues. The code quality doesn't give me a lot of hope.
arikrak 13y ago
Why did the government need to build any website? Why couldn't they just release data, and pass rules that health companies release data? Many websites would have offered to help bring the data to the users and the Government could have linked to some officially recognized ones.
BlarfWobble 13y ago
I'm shocked that people seem to think 3 years and $634m is a lot for a project of this scale. Are you all offering to design and build it 6 months in PHP for $50k ?
- newsreader 13y ago
  You don't? How many people do you guess were involved in the project? Divide the $600m by that number of people and you tell me if the cost is reasonable.
ktavera 13y ago
For all of you that didn't know, this project was never put out for bid with an RFP. It was sole-sourced to CGI Federal without any competitive bids. "Federal health officials have not yet explained why CGI was given the contract or why it was awarded on a sole-source basis." http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/some-say-health-care-sites-problems-highlight-flawed-federal-it-policies/2013/10/09/d558da42-30fe-11e3-8627-c5d7de0a046b_story_1.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/some-say-h... [Edit to add source]
- ctdonath 13y ago
  Upvote this. Heck, push it to all your favorite news outlets. There's no reason why one obscure company should get the contract without viable competitors.
  - Shivetya 13y ago
    http://washingtonexaminer.com/canadian-firm-hired-to-build-troubled-obamacare-exchanges/article/2536805 http://washingtonexaminer.com/canadian-firm-hired-to-build-t... Based on that article, the OP is wrong, the six hundred million is across all contracts, the ACA site which most people are aghast at is just under 60 million of that.
    - joering2 13y ago
      According to last sentence of [1], $90 went to CGI. [1] http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/10/09/3-million-obamacare-website-may-face-months-glitches-experts-warn/ http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/10/09/3-million-obamacare-w...
      - sp332 13y ago
        That's $90 million :)
    - ctdonath 13y ago
      Non-sequitur. That others got other contracts is not relevant to the point that this contractor got this $60M contract without a bidding process when there was no reason to not solicit bids from others. (As others note, seems it was a lot more than $60M.)
ScottWhigham 13y ago
This is what frustrates me about many of our non-USA HN'ers here: every time the state sponsored health care issue comes up, the non-USA folks can't wait to talk about how their country has it, or how it costs this little to get coverage for this or that problem in their country, and then they wonder why "you Americans" put up with the system you have currently in place (self-insured, no state plans - pre-Obamacare). I've read my share of comments (often from European HN'ers) that mock USA citizens' mentality with regard to state sponsored health care here. Well here you go - this is the perfect example to share with you as to why most Americans didn't/don't want "Obamacare". We, the voters, have no confidence that the current system+administration+Congress (or previous 10 of each!) could've created a system for "health insurance for all" that worked and was efficient. It's not anything against Obama - it's that we've seen administration after administration try to implement some big, sweeping group/plan for 20+ years and every one of them has turned into an inefficient holy hell of a mess. The most recent example of a major #$%&-up is Homeland Security (which I think is the last major agency created). If the American public believed that the current government was capable of delivering state sponsored health care in an efficient way, every Democrat and Republican in this country would've voted for it. So don't think of "those who are against Obamacare" as anti-Obama, but rather anti-inefficiency (or anti-bigger government).
- jmadsen 13y ago
  Right - because inefficiency in government programs is a purely American thing. We have affordable, universal health care because we've eliminated all forms of waste & corruption from our governments, and are left with a stream-lined, Indy 500 car pit type system. I don't think so. Get off it already - America doesn't have a decent health care system because insurance companies pay off corrupt congressmen to make sure you don't have one.
  - raldi 13y ago
    I'm not sure you're disagreeing with him. His point is that the US government has a history of creating huge expensive projects riddled with inefficiencies and which, quite often, yield a disappointing final product. Saying that one of the causes of that is corruption is not exactly refuting the claim.
kwhite 13y ago
As more and more legislation starts to be implemented via online apps, it seems almost inevitable that hacktivists will eventually attempt a filibuster by DDoS. Given the turbulent launch of the new federal healthcare exchanges, my confidence that the government would be able to handle such an attack is rapidly diminishing. I wonder how the political climate might shift if the threat of a de facto 'Annonymous veto' became something that policy makers actually had to worry about. On the up shot, it might finally force law makers to gain a responsible level of internet literacy...
pingswept 13y ago
Hmmm. I just created an account. The site loaded quickly. Took maybe 2 minutes to create an account. The password rules were weird, but I don't see what all the fuss is about. It seems to me that scaling a site from 0 users to millions in a couple of weeks is hard. If it's working now, which is seems to be, what's the problem? (OK, I'll concede that $634M is totally and completely insane. But I'm not convinced by the rest of the "bad code" complaints.)
- forgottenpass 13y ago
  Shhh... this thread is for tossing eachother off about how much better we envision we would do in the same circumstances and indulging in the schadenfreude that comes with the first time you figure out just how much of a boondoggle government contracting has become.
- mgkimsal 13y ago
  Can you actually log in and do anything? I created accounts last week, and now can't log in with them, or can log in and get a blank white screen. I've just tried creating yet another count. It's hung up on 'step 3' ('please wait' - modal spinner, assuming it's emailing my email address). 3 minutes spinning so far. OK - it just got done. Got an email. Clicked the link. Logged in. Pause... Taken to https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/auth/userprofile https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/auth/userprofile which is just a white screen. So... still not working for at least some people.
  - pingswept 13y ago
    Just clicked the confirmation link that appeared in my email. Had to accept some terms and conditions. I can't actually get insurance this way because I already have insurance through my state's exchange (I pretended I lived in Maine for this test account, since my state doesn't use healthcare.gov). But my profile page loaded fine. This series of steps also took less than a minute. Anyway, sorry it's not working for you, if you're really trying to get insurance.
    - 13y ago
3minus1 13y ago
Hi, I actually work for CGI Federal on a closely related website to healthcare.gov. There's some inaccurate speculation going on in this thread that I want to correct. Employees at CGI Federal are not payed hourly. Also, a lot of people have mentioned cronyism, which I think is baseless. CGI Federal already had contracts for Medicare.gov and CMS.gov, so when CMS had to build healthcare.gov, CGI was an obvious choice. edit: Also, the projects I work on are Agile and I get to use other technologies besides .Net framework (e.g. node.js and backbone.js)
- czr80 13y ago
  Can you share any insight into what went wrong?
- hga 13y ago
  Do you fill out time cards with hourly sort of precision? Do you have to fill in exactly 40 hours, no matter what? (Yes, I've worked for federal contractors before in the dozen years I spent Inside the Beltway.) As for cronyism, who's to say you got those other site honestly? Not saying you didn't, just that you're not citing any evidence. I can: I'm disabled and therefore on Medicare since 2007, and use medicare.gov to both handle Part D annual prescription plan selection and signup, and to check Part B claims. Aside from companies sometimes lying through their teeth about the costs for various drugs (well, it looks like that), I have no complaints besides the site being a little clunky. It gets the job done and has never shown any signs of buckling under load.
- pkfrank 13y ago
  >Also, a lot of people have mentioned cronyism, which I think is baseless. CGI Federal already had contracts for Medicare.gov and CMS.gov, so when CMS had to build healthcare.gov, CGI was an obvious choice. You may be correct, but arguing that "because we generally get these contracts, we were an obvious choice" does little to defuse assertions of cronyism.
  - 3minus1 13y ago
    > "because we generally get these contracts, we were an obvious choice" There are good reasons a government body might want to give a contract to someone they worked with before. There's a previous track record of success, and they know that the company already has expertise/solutions for their specialized requirements (i.e. section 508 compliance).
tomasien 13y ago
The sad part about this is, from what I can tell, there's not going to be any fixing this any time soon. The company who wrote the code doesn't know what they're doing, and nobody else is ever going to be able to figure it out NOW. Sad state of affairs.
vaughan 13y ago
Should have got Harper Reed and the Obama campaign tech team to knock it up in Rails on AWS.
lnanek2 13y ago
Haha, yeah, I spend hours across two days on those government health exchange sites (the US one and NY one) just trying to get a quote. Kept erroring out and forgetting my history and other problems. Meanwhile Freelancer's Union site was great: http://freelancersunion.org/ http://freelancersunion.org/ I got a quote easily before I had to do any quizzes. The gov ones were not like that. There were a few documents that had to be emailed in for verification, but they took care of that promptly. There was one bug related to zip+4 not being supported and not being changeable after entering, but they answered the phone immediately and fixed it in a minute.
jljljl 13y ago
This seems a little confusing to me. I'm using the site linked in one of the previous comments: http://usaspending.gov/explore?tab=By+Prime+Awardee&fiscal_year=all&idvpiid=HHSM500200700015I&typeofview=detailsummary http://usaspending.gov/explore?tab=By+Prime+Awardee&fiscal_y... This shows the $634M headline number as the amount of contracts paid to CGI Federal over a ~6 year period. It is filtered based on solicitation number HHSM500200700015I. A little googling returns the following page: https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=f1522d0262c63d01b34fab07c6ed5634&tab=core&_cview=0 https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=f1522d0... "The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) intends to modify the PECOS contract to support the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) requiremnts for the Development, Maintenance and Enhancements of HITECH Registration, Attestation and Inquiry Functionalities. This work is already on the contract, the modification will incorporate costs for the option years." So there's not really a lot of detail on what the HHSM500200700015I solicitation actually entails, and I haven't found a clear description everywhere else. It looks like it could cover a pretty broad set of work. For example, the ACA was signed in March 2010, but there's contracts tied to this solicitation number that go back to 2008-2009. A few of the news sites linked below imply that the $634M covers the total number of Medicare and PECOS contracts awarded by HHS to CGI, and that the ACA website cost only $93M, which makes it seem cheap compared to the private sites listed in the Digital Trends article: http://washingtonexaminer.com/canadian-firm-hired-to-build-troubled-obamacare-exchanges/article/2536805 http://washingtonexaminer.com/canadian-firm-hired-to-build-t... http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/10/09/3-million-obamacare-website-may-face-months-glitches-experts-warn/ http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/10/09/3-million-obamacare-w... Before we all explode in outrage, are we sure that we are reading the details of this correctly?
- dmix 13y ago
  > Before we all explode in outrage, are we sure that we are reading the details of this correctly? > the ACA website cost only $93M What more details do we need? There's much worse going on at the same time than that ridiculous number. But it is totally sufficient in on it's own to be outraged.
  - jljljl 13y ago
n72 13y ago
I can't sign up without js enabled. Should this site especially adhere to strict accessibility standards?
dc_ploy 13y ago
As someone who has worked on the front end of a couple of .govs, dealing with 1 mid level IT manager is enough. Having them all "collaborate" is just more chaos. The culture of the agency (DOD vs HHS) can also be difficult to work with.
jljljl 13y ago
Reread the article, this is complete nonsense. The $634M number is 6 years of contracts, starting in 2008 (Obamacare was signed into law on March 23, 2010), which doesn't align with his claim that CGI Federal won the contract in 2011. The solicitation number he uses to filter the USASpending.gov site is also tied to a larger PECOS contract, and not to Healthcare.gov like he claims. We're being had guys. This is poor reporting at best, or deliberate obfuscation at worst.
- driverdan 13y ago
  Maybe he got the total wrong for healthcare.gov but $634M should be enough to build and run every government website in the US for more than a decade.
  - aperrien 13y ago
    > $634M should be enough to build and run every government website in the US for more than a decade. And you know the requirements for the next ten years of computing technology how?
  - jonknee 13y ago
    That's a ridiculous statement. $63M a year to build, run, maintain and host unknown numbers of web sites (thousands!) and services that process trillions of dollars annually seems absurd. The total budget for all government websites isn't important (for starters they aren't paid for out of one bucket), it's just important that individually each one is managed competently.
  - aestra 13y ago
    You know that not all government websites are public facing, right?
- steveplace 13y ago
  At what number do we stop saying this is hilariously large? Even if the actual cost was 1/10th of that, it's still 60 million.
sailfast 13y ago
Things not considered by this and other articles that I would urge readers to consider: 1) RFPs are often written poorly by non-technical people, with requirements that are not accurate at the time. These requirements then change a lot to reflect reality which results in a lot of wasted effort and redirection. (This is probably also the case in large Enterprise implementations) 2) Compliance with government regulations costs money. Lots of money. This results in a lot more overhead. It also results in a lot more time to get people up to speed, on site, and going. This is why government contractors keep winning bids - compliance costs are huge barriers to entry. 3) Systems you need to integrate with in government (especially legacy systems) can be a complete pain in the butt. It's more likely you're integrating with some FORTRAN green screen than a nice JSON API. This makes large scale systems integration hard. That said...the app is still very broken and there is obviously a failure here. Failure to test properly (otherwise poorly written tests), failure to open to competitive bids judging from another comment in this thread, and many other issues. There is a LOT to be done to improve IT acquisition in government, and many things should have gone right that went wrong for the money spent (Figures I saw were more like $138 Million in other publications), but readers should please consider the organizational barriers and difficulties that exist and then factor it into the cost. It doesn't take the sting away, but it does lessen it a bit.
dreamdu5t 13y ago
A law fining Americans for not buying health insurance is not a "tax", it's a fine. It's a civil punishment. Double-speak. The sky is still blue even if the Supreme Court rules its green. The individual mandate is a civil penalty just like a parking ticket. The supreme court is a joke and the commerce clause crap has gone beyond the absurd.
GrinningFool 13y ago
I don't see the problem - just look at the site. It has a nice graphic that takes up two thirds of the page while giving no significant information. What could possibly be wrong with that? That's what most modern landing pages are doing, after all.
mcguire 13y ago
Out of curiosity, what is the proportion of non-governmental, large-scale site launches that have gone well? Seems like I can remember several very public commercial blow-ups.
medicalquack 13y ago
Ok here' some other contractor news, Serco in the UK under fraud investigation home of their corporate offices, one of the exchange contingency contracts given at the last minute as well as Equifax... http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2013/07/government-gives-contract-to-equifax-to.html http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2013/07/government-gives-cont... http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2013/07/obama-administration-doles-out-yet-one.html http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2013/07/obama-administration-...
donniefitz2 13y ago
There's a 5,534 line file (dummyData.js) and a 6000+ line (register.js) file, un-minified, with with global functions currently on the site. I would be fired for putting this sort of thing into production. For the $, there's no excuse for this. https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/js/ee/dummyData.js https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/js/ee/du... https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/registration.js https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/registra...

208 points by Yoms 13y ago

ck2 13y ago

If it really did cost over half a billion dollars for only 50k parallel connections, that is outrageous. It is hard to read/understand that spending breakdown, not sure what each 20-50 million dollar allotment is exactly for: http://usaspending.gov/explore?tab=By+Prime+Awardee&fiscal_year=all&idvpiid=HHSM500200700015I&typeofview=detailsummary http://usaspending.gov/explore?tab=By+Prime+Awardee&fiscal_y... Given how we can see the problem with this as developers, imagine what we don't understand about the 10 to 1 or even 100 to 1 overspending on the military and "defense" budget. Just imagine the TSA and "Homeland Security" waste.

JPKab 13y ago
It is truly an awful scenario. As I stated recently in a comment on this subject, Federal contracting is a Rent Seeking scenario: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking I have a weird role: I work at a company which does tons of Federal contracts, but also has lots of private sector work. I keep my sanity by doing short term consulting with private clients. There are some sharp people working the Federal side, but it really is awful. Winning a contract is EVERYTHING. It is a writing contest, and you can be sure that the Federal contract officer knows jack shit about the actual fundamentals of the project. The Contract Officer is a paper pusher whose job is to look at the line items in the Request for Proposal, and examine which company's proposal best "hits" each line item. And of course they will select a low bidder, which often is a bid too low for the company to even profit, simply meant to get their foot in the door. The staffing of these Federal contracts is horrific. You get entire teams of "change management" people. I'm currently assisting on a personnel system for a major military organization. I recently had to witness an entire discussion by the change management team on removing hyphens from a particular term to help the branding. I almost threw up in my mouth. The people I work with on the Fed contracts, in general, don't touch technology when they leave work. Therefore the only browser they use is IE8 (according to the customer org, it is more secure......) they do nothing outside of J2EE/.NET (usually just one of the two) and they HAVE/WILL never build a website that supports more than 5,000 enterprise users (concurrently). It is incredibly easy to look like a wizard amongst this bunch, but the experience of the Federal world has made me avoid these projects like the plague. The incentives at the business level (and therefore the high salary jobs) are ALL for winning contracts. Performing well on the work won is just viewed as another cost center.
- dfc 13y ago
  There are some sharp people working the Federal side, but it really is awful. What are you referring to with "it"? The folks at your company who do federal IT work? Government IT employees? Federal IT consulting?
  - dfxm12 13y ago
    the parent post seems to be referring to bidding for & working with the federal government on government contracts.
    - dfc 13y ago
      The sentence is: "There are some sharp people working the Federal side, but it really is awful." The "it" section is after the comma and not part of its own sentence. Maybe you could (I wouldn't) make that inference if it read: "There are some sharp people working the Federal side. But it really is awful."
      - enoch_r 13y ago
        It's similar to the sentence "Bob got a new girlfriend, but she is awful." "It" refers to "the Federal side."
        dfc 13y ago
        Federal side at OP's company (which OP is a member of) or in general?
  - cowsandmilk 13y ago
    I read "it" as a pronoun, not as "information technology"
    - dfc 13y ago
      Me too, I just can not figure out what the pronoun refers to. I am not sure why my request for clarification was down voted. I appreciated the comment and wanted to make sure I understood everything the OP was saying.
smackfu 13y ago
>It is hard to read/understand that spending breakdown, not sure what each 20-50 million dollar allotment is exactly for It's probably just a single contract with milestones that correspond to payments. Like "completed design" means they get 10%.
001sky 13y ago
for only 50k parallel connections Its hard to win when you set the goals like this (low), too
Shivetya 13y ago
It cost 55.7 to launch the site, the six hundred million dollar number is the total of all their contracts.

grej 13y ago

Eisenhower warned about the military industrial complex. This is just the latest manifestation of the government-industrial complex. I'd be willing to bet that CGI Federal (the contractor) has some very well connected cronies to have captured this boondoggle.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

wikiburner 13y ago

Scaling on the web is basically a solved issue for sites with such limited functionality. Even the CIA is using AWS, so I can't believe the regulatory and security hurdles were prohibitive. To spend this kind of money on sites with these kinds of results is just disgraceful: "The site is so busted that, as of a couple days ago, the number of people that successfully purchased healthcare through it was in the 'single digits,' according to the Washington Post." http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505269_162-57606633/obamacare-website-looks-like-nobody-tested-it-programmer-says/ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505269_162-57606633/obamacare-we...

josefresco 13y ago
Beware of potentially politically motivated garbage quotes. The referenced Washington Post article quoted an "insurance industry official" who would only speak anonymously: “Very, very few people that we’re aware of have enrolled in the federal exchange,” said one insurance industry official, who like many in the industry, spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for possibly offending the Obama administration. “We are talking single digits.” So one guy allegedly in the "insurance industry" who won't give his name has said enrollment has been in the single digits. Not overall enrollment mind you, just what this one guy has seen come across his desk. But that's how this article has been spun. Millions of people! single digit success rate! as reported by "some guy". A sad state of affairs indeed.
- sally84 13y ago
  You do realize people are purchasing Obamacare through those insurance companies, right?
- wikiburner 13y ago
  How about the CBS video linked above? Or the links below? Or the countless other media accounts of the launch being a "complete disaster"? Or all the comments on this very page of HNers not being able to use the site? Not even the administration's biggest defenders are trying to spin this as a successful launch. Are you really implying the media as a whole is biased against Obama? http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505269_162-57606633/obamacare-website-looks-like-nobody-tested-it-programmer-says/ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505269_162-57606633/obamacare-we... http://bigstory.ap.org/article/poll-rollout-health-exchanges-gets-thumbs-down http://bigstory.ap.org/article/poll-rollout-health-exchanges... http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/some-say-health-care-sites-problems-highlight-flawed-federal-it-policies/2013/10/09/d558da42-30fe-11e3-8627-c5d7de0a046b_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/some-say-h...

ams6110 13y ago

Maybe it wasn't ever intended to work.

swamp40 13y ago
I'm pretty jaded w/r/t the fed gov, but I don't see where anyone gains here. People are so outraged that they call up their senator and demand...what? The only thing people will demand is that the website gets fixed ASAP, because they were looking for some affordable healthcare options.

dccoolgai 13y ago

This is absolutely nothing compared to what they waste on technology in DOD...

devx 13y ago
I'd be happy if they were actually "wasting it on technology", but this seems like corrupt money, going into the pockets of big corporations for very little and poor work. They probably charge at least 10x what it's worth on the market, and do work that is worse than the average on the market. It helps that the people signing these contracts are either clueless or don't care, since it's not their money.

Tloewald 13y ago

> the factors that play into which companies receive government contracts, a process called “procurement,” are fundamentally broken This.

Osmium 13y ago
How would you fix it? I could imagine a competitive process, e.g. pay a number of different companies to start producing their solution in parallel. And then at the end of 3 months, pick the one(s) that looks the most promising and pay them to continue with it. It sounds wasteful, but I just don't see a better way, because people seem incapable of judging beforehand which companies are actually capable of providing on their promises.
- dexen 13y ago
  I'm all for it -- good old free market and whatnot, but... how exactly would one pick the most promissing project? Do we have any undisputable metric of project progress (both completeness and quality) yet? Would we judge competing projects by kLOC? By percentage of code coverage? By extensibility of architecture? By percentage of GUI widgets already laid yout (even if just mocked up)? Or perhaps by conformance to an arbitrary test suite -- which raises the good old `Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?' problem?
- Tloewald 13y ago
  I think that this plus open source. If anything should be open source it's anything built for governments. I should note that the project I'm on did use this approach, but having picked winners it then proceeded to monkey with the teams constantly and generally screw everything up anyway.
- mseebach 13y ago
  Generally: get government out of the business of procuring custom software and shift to procuring outcomes. Something like these healthcare exchanges should have been put to the market in a from where the revenue is directly tied to the end goal: The successful purchase of health insurance by customers (or whatever is the case here, I'm not intimately familiar with the mechanics). Have providers bid on the full thing by revenue pr. successful transaction + an SLA that deducts an appropriate penalty if it isn't met. Ideally, you don't even need to pick a winner, you can just say that any provider that successfully operates such a marketplace will get the revenue per transaction and let the market sort it out. End users will gravitate towards the sites that are fast and easy to use, "Consumer Reports" will test them etc. Lean, agile shops will win. Clunky, well-connected, but technically unsophisticated government contractors will fail.

gexla 13y ago

They should have opened the bidding process to Elance, they could have found someone to do the back-end for like 5K. ;) ETA: > And when things still go wrong, they simply throw “more money at the same people who caused the problem to fix the problem." For that much money, I could be a terrible web developer.

Nodex 13y ago

Not to mention its awful responsiveness. Just sayin ;)

SmileyKeith 13y ago

It definitely seems like the amount of money the government spends on projects like this starts out at something outrageous no matter how complex.

ashishbharthi 13y ago

Site just crashed my IE8. Generally I have had nicer experience with most sites developed under Obama administration like wh.gov and such.

Yoms 13y ago

Interestingly CGI is a Canadian company...

CedarMadness 13y ago
CGI Federal is run mostly independently to get around the laws preventing foreign companies from bidding on US government contracts. Source: I used to work there.
blottsie 13y ago
CGI is a Canadian company, but CGI Federal is a wholly-owned U.S. subsidiary.

pkorzeniewski 13y ago

I'll never understand how it's possible that government web sites cost so much, yet usually look like shit, work like shit and are easy to hack (at least in my country). I always get the feeling that companies that win the contracts are somehow related to people responsible for the decision, it's like "Hey, it's not our money, so let's milk the budget as much as possible!".

RWeaver 13y ago
It's because they're procured based on verifiable requirements, and yet there's no way to specify a verifiable requirement for user interaction. Security is almost the same. 'Must be secure!'. Unless they procure and schedule independent penetration testing and code audit (if they even get the code), the vendor is able to deliver insecure code with a horrible UI and still be 100% within the terms of the contract. The reason government doesn't do more agile is because the politics of the stakeholders can get crazy, with the end result being constantly shifting goal posts and nothing delivered. So they require Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS - give us something that already works), and yet due to the requirements... there's always significant customization required. I wish someone in government understood this : P
BSousa 13y ago
In Portugal, I know of about 5 systems that were developed by either companies of family members of politicians or by companies were one of the shareholders/owners were the decider on which company to use. The INEM (emergency response unit) hardware and software was sold by to INEM by the company the person deciding on which company to use created and then left INEM. Sorta went like Public Contest -> Manager creates company and submits project -> Manager chooses own company -> Manager quits INEM to 'work' at the new company. This is public knowledge but there isn't much we can do about it
jon-wood 13y ago
One of the few things I agree with our current government in the UK on is their move to bring government IT in house from external companies. That decision has led to Government Digital Services, who are building out http://gov.uk/ http://gov.uk/, and a few other digital departments within government. A friend of mine works at the Ministry of Justice, and told me recently he has the easiest job in the world, because even if he were to just sit at his desk and do nothing he'd be delivering a better service than the agencies that proceeded him, and saving the ministry huge amounts of money.

danso 13y ago

As has been noted on HN at the time, the front-facing part of the site was released as open-source 3 months ago: https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov You can deploy it like any other Jekyll site. The code and content has changed since then but I imagine it still has the same static front facing architecture, much like the Obama campaign fundraising site, which famously raised $250M using Jekyll static pages: http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-million-fundraising-platform/ http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-millio... So the number of raw visitors may not be the most relevant number, as many of them may have hit the front page and left, or never got around to the signup part. But what exactly was the technology in the back-end stack?

smoyer 13y ago

Imagine what this community could build with more than half a billion dollars!

arbuge 13y ago
It is easy to see that. What's needed is somebody to shake up the whole government contract procurement system. A gigantic schlep right there...
- smoyer 13y ago
  Very true ... how do you fit that into the 3 months before demo day? I'm seeing a system that contains a complete list of government contractors/sub-contractors (this actually exists today). For each company, a list of verified skills (a proven track record) would allow a procurement agent to narrow the field, and a reputation system that let's the cream rise to the top. I'm not sure it would be feasible to track the employees that make up a company as that's pretty fluid (on the time-scale of government contracts), but in the software field, you could (for instance) sum the reputation of the company's developers stack-overflow profiles. Obviously, a lot more thought is required!
anarchitect 13y ago
Take a look at what the GDS is doing here in the UK. * hire really smart people with up-to-date views on technology [1] * build on, and release new open source [2] [1] https://www.gov.uk/designprinciples https://www.gov.uk/designprinciples [2] https://github.com/alphagov https://github.com/alphagov
- quickpost 13y ago
  That is really cool. Thanks for posting.
pyre 13y ago
Half of an Instagram!

dkhenry 13y ago

Good thing we are giving the federal government control over the healthcare system ( and positioning them to take even more control as we move towards single payer ). I am sure they won't screw it up like they have the the roll out of this small portion of the system. Also I am really looking forwards to the day I can't get my kid seen by a doctor because there was a budget fight and the government shut down.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
pyre 13y ago
Think how stupid both sides will look if actual deaths can be attributed to their political posturing over fiscal matters. E.g. "Little Jimmy died because he couldn't get essential treatment. How can you try to make that ok by saying that you were both playing chicken, but the 'other guy' should have backed down?"
k-mcgrady 13y ago
>> "Also I am really looking forwards to the day I can't get my kid seen by a doctor because there was a budget fight and the government shut down." Do you not think that doctors would be one of the essential personal not effected by a shutdown? And do you seriously believe the US would completely ban private medical care? We have the NHS (free health care for everyone) but we also still have privatised care which you can choose to pay for if you want. It's 2013 and the US still doesn't provide free health care for its citizens. Pigs will fly before they not only do that, but ban private care.
chadwickthebold 13y ago
The affordable care act mandates people get health coverage, prevents denial of coverage due to pre-existing conditions, provides centralized services to purchase health coverage, and expands federal programs for medicare and medicaid. Your local doctor isn't going to refuse to see you because they are still paid by an insurance company, and not the federal government.

djim 13y ago

this is an absurd waste of taxpayer money. we shouldn't let the government and their contractors get away with this sort of robbery. it is no wonder we are so far in debt as a nation.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

Political organizations exist for political reasons. So if you get elected to "do something" about orphans, you'll create an organization to do something. The goal of this organization is political: appear to be making progress on the orphan problem. At the very least, do not appear in the news as an example of government waste. The current website problem is a political failure -- it looks bad. But that's just a short term consideration. The long-term bet is that over the next decades, the ACA will bring great political benefit to the political party that supported it, no matter what other things it does. So when we evaluate projects created by political organizations for political reasons, the success criteria is much different than commercial or non-profit projects. I don't think this is a failure. Maybe a bump in the road, but it's nothing that won't work itself out over the next year or so. (And be long forgotten) Remember, a lot of government contractors made money building these sites. A lot of people had jobs. A lot of committees and functionaries are able to add this to their list of good they've done in the world. Not being able to actually use the site for a while is a small pittance compared to the real, measured benefit the sites have created. So far. If it drags on for a long time, the political math could switch around the other way, but I doubt it.

001sky 13y ago
The problem with this logic is that carte balche on an amex is no way to run a government, even if every dime spent is sucessful in "keeping you in power". To the extent that one is rationalizing the status quo, it is pointing out the obvious. Unfortunately, the math no longer works and the system is going to be reset as someone else has to pick up the tab. It may be republicans or it may be your children. But whomever gets stuck with the bills is going to be pissed off, methinks. Part of being a successful politician is not creating deep-seated enenimities.
- DanielBMarkham 13y ago
  When the U.S. was founded, slavery was a key concern. Jefferson and others knew that slavery couldn't last, but there was no way to get agreement on it. So what did they do? They left the problem to future generations to solve. And the result involved a lot of bloodshed. In any system of government, there's always going to be a strong desire to kick problems down the road for somebody else to solve. I think the best we can hope for is some structures in place to minimize this, but you'll never get rid of it completely. What we see now is just 250 years or so of this thinking, with the default solution of letting somebody else handle it growing more powerful with each passing year.

malaporte 13y ago

A colleague of mine used to be some kind of manager/director at that company (in another country though). He once described his former job as "milking the government". They hire the lowest quality engineers (e.g. the cheapest), and then bill them outlandish $/hour to work for government agencies. The project plans are packed with useless stuff, and are designed to exceed initial estimations. They get paid by the hour...

zachrose 13y ago

There are a lot of interesting things to say about a $634M website that didn’t work when it should have, but what pops out at me here is the description of “poorly written code.” This article even links directly to some of the code, which A) looks fine? and B) is like “Yeah, the problem wasn’t with procurement regulations or clear requirements or public-private cronyism or managerial competence, it was that damn person who told the computer what to do and the computer didn’t do the right thing.”

joshuahedlund 13y ago
Here is my personal experience with some of that "poorly written" code: http://www.postlibertarian.com/2013/10/yes-the-obamacare-website-really-is-really-bad/ http://www.postlibertarian.com/2013/10/yes-the-obamacare-web... > the text on the sign-up page, the front-end javascript validation on the sign-up page, and the text on the help page all have different requirements for valid usernames in the database!
- penguat 13y ago
  That sounds like poor BA/spec work. BA asks: "what do we need from this username". BA should ask "what do we need from usernames overall"? It's always going to be hard to be agile on federal contracts - there're too many customers to really get a clear view from them.
  - joshuahedlund 13y ago
    A fair point. Other examples of problems were empty drop-down menus from presumably non-cached failed DB accesses[0] and forgot password links in emails leading to an error about no match found for the provided information [me], which I suppose you could respectively file under 'unexpected heavy load' and 'bug' rather than 'poorly written code', though at some point no matter how you classify the problems it makes me nervous to submit my information because I wonder what security holes are waiting to be discovered along with the other problems. [0]http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-02/untangling-obamacare-s-web-glitches.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-02/untangling-obamacar...

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

jmarin 13y ago

has anyone here actually attempted to use the site, or just reading about how it fails? The only commenter I've read was using IE. I just signed up and had no problems.

WesleyJohnson 13y ago
I tried signing up the day it launched and ran into issues with 404s. After 3 or 4 days, I was finally able to create an account. When I went back the following day to login for the first time to choose a plan, I couldn't login. I get a message saying my login credentials are incorrect. I hit the forgot password link and enter in my username. It finds my account and sends me a password reset email. I click on the link in the password reset email and it takes me back to healthcare.gov with an error message that my account can't be found, which obviously makes no sense because they just used my account to send me an email. Live Chat has provided zero help, only stating that it's probably a performance issue and to try back later. One odd thing is that the registration page says you a need a lower case and upper case character, a number and at least one symbol from a pre-defined set. To my knowledge, I didn't use an uppercase character, nor do I use one when do the password reset, which properly sends me an email. I feel like maybe the login portion is properly validating the username requirements, but the registration didn't which is what has left me in this mess. Sorry, this site isn't worth $600 million.

twrkit 13y ago

So this is what $634mm gets you? https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/registration.js https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/registra...

mark_l_watson 13y ago

I lost my group health plan, which I had for fifteen years, recently so I has experienced the web site first hand :-) My latest complaint: I logged in many times last week to fill in information, a bit at a time before I lost access. Then starting Sunday morning I could no longer login. On the phone last night I was told that they had wiped all stored passwords and to follow the "I don't remember my password" link. Couldn't they have posted that as a huge banner message and let people know? I had four days of frustration trying to login. Then, when I got the reset password link, and followed it, one of the profile verification questions they asked for resetting my password WAS A QUESTION THAT I HAD NOT BEEN ASKED so I had no way to answer it. I wrote down my profile questions so I am fairly sure of this. wTF

hga 13y ago
Strange, it was national news they'd wiped all passwords ... as you say, we can't imagine why that wasn't in a banner message.
nutate 13y ago
To play devils advocate, have you tried logging into Aetna, Cigna, Blue Cross Blue Shield, etc recently? Just as fucked in terms of passwords being screwed, lockouts, other such nonsense.
- Raphael 13y ago
  No, but I've signed in to Facebook, Google, Reddit, etc. It's a solved problem.
  - nutate 13y ago
    Most cutting edge computer science folks like to make money selling ads not selling cheap insurance.
- Raphael 13y ago
  No, but I've signed in to Facebook, Google, Reddit, etc. It's a solved problem.

tokenadult 13y ago

National Public Radio had a good report on 8 October 2013, "Health Exchange Tech Problems Point To A Thornier Issue," http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/10/08/230424841/health-exchange-tech-problems-point-to-a-thornier-issue http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/10/08/230424... that discusses the broader issue of United States federal government contracting for information technology services. Some reforms are suggested in that story that would help more competent startup companies compete against the established federal contractors that win most of the big contracts. The specialized skill that the incumbents bring to the contracting process is not specialized skill in data-processing or programming for federal agencies, but rather specialized skill in navigating the federal bureaucracy for bidding on federal contracts.

puller 13y ago
The difference between established federal contractors and startups disappears if startups get federal contracts. I know a lot of startups would like a better shot at that cash, but if the problem is in the incentives then it's no help to get different people doing the same things. If there are already problems with how federal contracts are awarded, it is hard to imagine that wholesale deregulation is going to result in a more selective process. For example, blind removal of lowest-bidder requirements would make larger-scale corruption even easier. There are legitimate complaints and federal contracting needs work, but what kind of work? Let's not underestimate how much worse we can make it. The money on the table is ample incentive for people to propose innocent-sounding reforms which really just open up the taps or redirect them to different parties rather than increasing efficiency.
- mgkimsal 13y ago
  Having a scoring system that takes in to account how many previous govt projects have gone over budget and over time would help. Yes, small company X might not have a track record, and might end up folding in 2 years (especially if they can't get decent sized contracts to stay in business), but is that necessarily any worse than bigcoXYZ getting contract, then taking 3 years longer than proposed and going 400% over budget? Look at the track record of the company, and use that in factoring in contract awards. Companies that routinely go over budget and over time should be penalized by having a reduced chance of getting contracts in the first place. That's one thing that would help level the playing field a bit. Of course, what would happen is those larger companies would create related spin-offs that are technically not related, and they'd have 'fresh' stats to compete with, and the cycle would start over again, probably.

mploi123 13y ago

I have worked with IT consulting for the government (in Brazil), and if the software needs of the american government are similar to the Brazilian ones, you can't compare twitter, instagram, etc. with this! They are completely different kinds of software, governmental softwares have tons of integration with old COBOL systems that runs millions of sensible data, and tons of requirements, really, pages and pages of different use case scenarios. Governmental software require more man-hours than successful start ups, even when they work and succeed as a project. The "MVP" of a governmental system is huge. Now, don't get me wrong. the price is absurd, this example is clearly a total failure. It's just that this article compare apples to oranges.

jzwinck 13y ago

I told https://www.healthcare.gov/ https://www.healthcare.gov/ that I want to apply and live in New York. It immediately gave me a link to http://nystateofhealth.ny.gov/ http://nystateofhealth.ny.gov/ . I clicked the link, and it says: > Access Denied > You don't have permission to access "http://nystateofhealth.ny.gov/" http://nystateofhealth.ny.gov/" on this server. Why would the top level of such a site have permissions at all?

cjrandolph 13y ago
It works now. It was an oversight with their SSL registration. The link given to the feds was www. Which worked. They just omitted the www.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

knodi 13y ago

Who is in-charge for healthcare.org? What company?

nitid_name 13y ago
CGI Federal. Please read the articles.

nhebb 13y ago

I'm less concerned about the short term scalability issues as I am about the long term security and privacy issues. The code quality doesn't give me a lot of hope.

arikrak 13y ago

Why did the government need to build any website? Why couldn't they just release data, and pass rules that health companies release data? Many websites would have offered to help bring the data to the users and the Government could have linked to some officially recognized ones.

BlarfWobble 13y ago

I'm shocked that people seem to think 3 years and $634m is a lot for a project of this scale. Are you all offering to design and build it 6 months in PHP for $50k ?

newsreader 13y ago
You don't? How many people do you guess were involved in the project? Divide the $600m by that number of people and you tell me if the cost is reasonable.

ktavera 13y ago

For all of you that didn't know, this project was never put out for bid with an RFP. It was sole-sourced to CGI Federal without any competitive bids. "Federal health officials have not yet explained why CGI was given the contract or why it was awarded on a sole-source basis." http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/some-say-health-care-sites-problems-highlight-flawed-federal-it-policies/2013/10/09/d558da42-30fe-11e3-8627-c5d7de0a046b_story_1.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/some-say-h... [Edit to add source]

ctdonath 13y ago
Upvote this. Heck, push it to all your favorite news outlets. There's no reason why one obscure company should get the contract without viable competitors.
- Shivetya 13y ago
  http://washingtonexaminer.com/canadian-firm-hired-to-build-troubled-obamacare-exchanges/article/2536805 http://washingtonexaminer.com/canadian-firm-hired-to-build-t... Based on that article, the OP is wrong, the six hundred million is across all contracts, the ACA site which most people are aghast at is just under 60 million of that.
  - joering2 13y ago
    According to last sentence of [1], $90 went to CGI. [1] http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/10/09/3-million-obamacare-website-may-face-months-glitches-experts-warn/ http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/10/09/3-million-obamacare-w...
    - sp332 13y ago
      That's $90 million :)
  - ctdonath 13y ago
    Non-sequitur. That others got other contracts is not relevant to the point that this contractor got this $60M contract without a bidding process when there was no reason to not solicit bids from others. (As others note, seems it was a lot more than $60M.)

ScottWhigham 13y ago

This is what frustrates me about many of our non-USA HN'ers here: every time the state sponsored health care issue comes up, the non-USA folks can't wait to talk about how their country has it, or how it costs this little to get coverage for this or that problem in their country, and then they wonder why "you Americans" put up with the system you have currently in place (self-insured, no state plans - pre-Obamacare). I've read my share of comments (often from European HN'ers) that mock USA citizens' mentality with regard to state sponsored health care here. Well here you go - this is the perfect example to share with you as to why most Americans didn't/don't want "Obamacare". We, the voters, have no confidence that the current system+administration+Congress (or previous 10 of each!) could've created a system for "health insurance for all" that worked and was efficient. It's not anything against Obama - it's that we've seen administration after administration try to implement some big, sweeping group/plan for 20+ years and every one of them has turned into an inefficient holy hell of a mess. The most recent example of a major #$%&-up is Homeland Security (which I think is the last major agency created). If the American public believed that the current government was capable of delivering state sponsored health care in an efficient way, every Democrat and Republican in this country would've voted for it. So don't think of "those who are against Obamacare" as anti-Obama, but rather anti-inefficiency (or anti-bigger government).

jmadsen 13y ago
Right - because inefficiency in government programs is a purely American thing. We have affordable, universal health care because we've eliminated all forms of waste & corruption from our governments, and are left with a stream-lined, Indy 500 car pit type system. I don't think so. Get off it already - America doesn't have a decent health care system because insurance companies pay off corrupt congressmen to make sure you don't have one.
- raldi 13y ago
  I'm not sure you're disagreeing with him. His point is that the US government has a history of creating huge expensive projects riddled with inefficiencies and which, quite often, yield a disappointing final product. Saying that one of the causes of that is corruption is not exactly refuting the claim.

kwhite 13y ago

As more and more legislation starts to be implemented via online apps, it seems almost inevitable that hacktivists will eventually attempt a filibuster by DDoS. Given the turbulent launch of the new federal healthcare exchanges, my confidence that the government would be able to handle such an attack is rapidly diminishing. I wonder how the political climate might shift if the threat of a de facto 'Annonymous veto' became something that policy makers actually had to worry about. On the up shot, it might finally force law makers to gain a responsible level of internet literacy...

pingswept 13y ago

Hmmm. I just created an account. The site loaded quickly. Took maybe 2 minutes to create an account. The password rules were weird, but I don't see what all the fuss is about. It seems to me that scaling a site from 0 users to millions in a couple of weeks is hard. If it's working now, which is seems to be, what's the problem? (OK, I'll concede that $634M is totally and completely insane. But I'm not convinced by the rest of the "bad code" complaints.)

forgottenpass 13y ago
Shhh... this thread is for tossing eachother off about how much better we envision we would do in the same circumstances and indulging in the schadenfreude that comes with the first time you figure out just how much of a boondoggle government contracting has become.
mgkimsal 13y ago
Can you actually log in and do anything? I created accounts last week, and now can't log in with them, or can log in and get a blank white screen. I've just tried creating yet another count. It's hung up on 'step 3' ('please wait' - modal spinner, assuming it's emailing my email address). 3 minutes spinning so far. OK - it just got done. Got an email. Clicked the link. Logged in. Pause... Taken to https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/auth/userprofile https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/auth/userprofile which is just a white screen. So... still not working for at least some people.
- pingswept 13y ago
  Just clicked the confirmation link that appeared in my email. Had to accept some terms and conditions. I can't actually get insurance this way because I already have insurance through my state's exchange (I pretended I lived in Maine for this test account, since my state doesn't use healthcare.gov). But my profile page loaded fine. This series of steps also took less than a minute. Anyway, sorry it's not working for you, if you're really trying to get insurance.
  - 13y ago

3minus1 13y ago

Hi, I actually work for CGI Federal on a closely related website to healthcare.gov. There's some inaccurate speculation going on in this thread that I want to correct. Employees at CGI Federal are not payed hourly. Also, a lot of people have mentioned cronyism, which I think is baseless. CGI Federal already had contracts for Medicare.gov and CMS.gov, so when CMS had to build healthcare.gov, CGI was an obvious choice. edit: Also, the projects I work on are Agile and I get to use other technologies besides .Net framework (e.g. node.js and backbone.js)

czr80 13y ago
Can you share any insight into what went wrong?
hga 13y ago
Do you fill out time cards with hourly sort of precision? Do you have to fill in exactly 40 hours, no matter what? (Yes, I've worked for federal contractors before in the dozen years I spent Inside the Beltway.) As for cronyism, who's to say you got those other site honestly? Not saying you didn't, just that you're not citing any evidence. I can: I'm disabled and therefore on Medicare since 2007, and use medicare.gov to both handle Part D annual prescription plan selection and signup, and to check Part B claims. Aside from companies sometimes lying through their teeth about the costs for various drugs (well, it looks like that), I have no complaints besides the site being a little clunky. It gets the job done and has never shown any signs of buckling under load.
pkfrank 13y ago
>Also, a lot of people have mentioned cronyism, which I think is baseless. CGI Federal already had contracts for Medicare.gov and CMS.gov, so when CMS had to build healthcare.gov, CGI was an obvious choice. You may be correct, but arguing that "because we generally get these contracts, we were an obvious choice" does little to defuse assertions of cronyism.
- 3minus1 13y ago
  > "because we generally get these contracts, we were an obvious choice" There are good reasons a government body might want to give a contract to someone they worked with before. There's a previous track record of success, and they know that the company already has expertise/solutions for their specialized requirements (i.e. section 508 compliance).

tomasien 13y ago

The sad part about this is, from what I can tell, there's not going to be any fixing this any time soon. The company who wrote the code doesn't know what they're doing, and nobody else is ever going to be able to figure it out NOW. Sad state of affairs.

vaughan 13y ago

Should have got Harper Reed and the Obama campaign tech team to knock it up in Rails on AWS.

lnanek2 13y ago

Haha, yeah, I spend hours across two days on those government health exchange sites (the US one and NY one) just trying to get a quote. Kept erroring out and forgetting my history and other problems. Meanwhile Freelancer's Union site was great: http://freelancersunion.org/ http://freelancersunion.org/ I got a quote easily before I had to do any quizzes. The gov ones were not like that. There were a few documents that had to be emailed in for verification, but they took care of that promptly. There was one bug related to zip+4 not being supported and not being changeable after entering, but they answered the phone immediately and fixed it in a minute.

jljljl 13y ago

This seems a little confusing to me. I'm using the site linked in one of the previous comments: http://usaspending.gov/explore?tab=By+Prime+Awardee&fiscal_year=all&idvpiid=HHSM500200700015I&typeofview=detailsummary http://usaspending.gov/explore?tab=By+Prime+Awardee&fiscal_y... This shows the $634M headline number as the amount of contracts paid to CGI Federal over a ~6 year period. It is filtered based on solicitation number HHSM500200700015I. A little googling returns the following page: https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=f1522d0262c63d01b34fab07c6ed5634&tab=core&_cview=0 https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=f1522d0... "The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) intends to modify the PECOS contract to support the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) requiremnts for the Development, Maintenance and Enhancements of HITECH Registration, Attestation and Inquiry Functionalities. This work is already on the contract, the modification will incorporate costs for the option years." So there's not really a lot of detail on what the HHSM500200700015I solicitation actually entails, and I haven't found a clear description everywhere else. It looks like it could cover a pretty broad set of work. For example, the ACA was signed in March 2010, but there's contracts tied to this solicitation number that go back to 2008-2009. A few of the news sites linked below imply that the $634M covers the total number of Medicare and PECOS contracts awarded by HHS to CGI, and that the ACA website cost only $93M, which makes it seem cheap compared to the private sites listed in the Digital Trends article: http://washingtonexaminer.com/canadian-firm-hired-to-build-troubled-obamacare-exchanges/article/2536805 http://washingtonexaminer.com/canadian-firm-hired-to-build-t... http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/10/09/3-million-obamacare-website-may-face-months-glitches-experts-warn/ http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/10/09/3-million-obamacare-w... Before we all explode in outrage, are we sure that we are reading the details of this correctly?

dmix 13y ago
> Before we all explode in outrage, are we sure that we are reading the details of this correctly? > the ACA website cost only $93M What more details do we need? There's much worse going on at the same time than that ridiculous number. But it is totally sufficient in on it's own to be outraged.
- jljljl 13y ago

n72 13y ago

I can't sign up without js enabled. Should this site especially adhere to strict accessibility standards?

dc_ploy 13y ago

As someone who has worked on the front end of a couple of .govs, dealing with 1 mid level IT manager is enough. Having them all "collaborate" is just more chaos. The culture of the agency (DOD vs HHS) can also be difficult to work with.

jljljl 13y ago

Reread the article, this is complete nonsense. The $634M number is 6 years of contracts, starting in 2008 (Obamacare was signed into law on March 23, 2010), which doesn't align with his claim that CGI Federal won the contract in 2011. The solicitation number he uses to filter the USASpending.gov site is also tied to a larger PECOS contract, and not to Healthcare.gov like he claims. We're being had guys. This is poor reporting at best, or deliberate obfuscation at worst.

driverdan 13y ago
Maybe he got the total wrong for healthcare.gov but $634M should be enough to build and run every government website in the US for more than a decade.
- aperrien 13y ago
  > $634M should be enough to build and run every government website in the US for more than a decade. And you know the requirements for the next ten years of computing technology how?
- jonknee 13y ago
  That's a ridiculous statement. $63M a year to build, run, maintain and host unknown numbers of web sites (thousands!) and services that process trillions of dollars annually seems absurd. The total budget for all government websites isn't important (for starters they aren't paid for out of one bucket), it's just important that individually each one is managed competently.
- aestra 13y ago
  You know that not all government websites are public facing, right?
steveplace 13y ago
At what number do we stop saying this is hilariously large? Even if the actual cost was 1/10th of that, it's still 60 million.

sailfast 13y ago

Things not considered by this and other articles that I would urge readers to consider: 1) RFPs are often written poorly by non-technical people, with requirements that are not accurate at the time. These requirements then change a lot to reflect reality which results in a lot of wasted effort and redirection. (This is probably also the case in large Enterprise implementations) 2) Compliance with government regulations costs money. Lots of money. This results in a lot more overhead. It also results in a lot more time to get people up to speed, on site, and going. This is why government contractors keep winning bids - compliance costs are huge barriers to entry. 3) Systems you need to integrate with in government (especially legacy systems) can be a complete pain in the butt. It's more likely you're integrating with some FORTRAN green screen than a nice JSON API. This makes large scale systems integration hard. That said...the app is still very broken and there is obviously a failure here. Failure to test properly (otherwise poorly written tests), failure to open to competitive bids judging from another comment in this thread, and many other issues. There is a LOT to be done to improve IT acquisition in government, and many things should have gone right that went wrong for the money spent (Figures I saw were more like $138 Million in other publications), but readers should please consider the organizational barriers and difficulties that exist and then factor it into the cost. It doesn't take the sting away, but it does lessen it a bit.

dreamdu5t 13y ago

A law fining Americans for not buying health insurance is not a "tax", it's a fine. It's a civil punishment. Double-speak. The sky is still blue even if the Supreme Court rules its green. The individual mandate is a civil penalty just like a parking ticket. The supreme court is a joke and the commerce clause crap has gone beyond the absurd.

GrinningFool 13y ago

I don't see the problem - just look at the site. It has a nice graphic that takes up two thirds of the page while giving no significant information. What could possibly be wrong with that? That's what most modern landing pages are doing, after all.

mcguire 13y ago

Out of curiosity, what is the proportion of non-governmental, large-scale site launches that have gone well? Seems like I can remember several very public commercial blow-ups.

medicalquack 13y ago

Ok here' some other contractor news, Serco in the UK under fraud investigation home of their corporate offices, one of the exchange contingency contracts given at the last minute as well as Equifax... http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2013/07/government-gives-contract-to-equifax-to.html http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2013/07/government-gives-cont... http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2013/07/obama-administration-doles-out-yet-one.html http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2013/07/obama-administration-...

donniefitz2 13y ago

There's a 5,534 line file (dummyData.js) and a 6000+ line (register.js) file, un-minified, with with global functions currently on the site. I would be fired for putting this sort of thing into production. For the $, there's no excuse for this. https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/js/ee/dummyData.js https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/js/ee/du... https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/registration.js https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/registra...