4 ms·

We paid over $500M for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

53 points by timhargis 13y ago

gexla 13y ago
Of course it's over budget. Once you get past the $100 million mark for a web app, your estimation skills start breaking down a bit. But it's good when you have a client who can print money and the private players in the DOD as inspiration. Why not go over budget? You aren't doing a government contract right unless you are going way over budget. I would love to send out an invoice for over $100 million. Even better would be to pick up the phone and tell the government that you are burning through the cash and you will need another $100 million to keep going. Who is their senior developer? Kobe Bryant? Their development team? The L.A. Lakers? "Sorry, Kobe is refusing to write another line of code until we renew his contract."
philfreo 13y ago
Serious question... where does all that money go? Are a few people personally making many millions off this deal? Or are there really hundreds or thousands of employees working on it? Or is it getting subcontracted out many times with each layer taking a slice?
- jakejake 13y ago
  I'd imagine it's a gravy train gig all around. The payoff can be very large, but the government makes you jump through all manner of hoops at every stage of the way. I've actually done government work at the state level (ironically working on healthcare systems) and it's crazy how difficult it is to get anything accomplished. To start with the proposal process is extremely intense and only a small number of companies have the resources to even apply for a project like this. The system I worked on was more simple than this and our proposal documentation was hundreds of pages. With this being such a hot political issue, I can't even imagine the politics going on behind the scenes on top of any technical challenges. The number of meetings and reviews was probably astronomical. I have no doubt that some principles at CGI are making huge profits off of projects like these, but it's not totally free money as it might seem.
dude3 13y ago
I went to CGI's website. It says offshoring. The javascript on healthcare.gov looks like they hired someone on Odesk.
- mithras 13y ago
  All those millions still go to the lowest bidder.
- rozap 13y ago
  Yea I don't think the programmers got the cash. Though I'll bet some executives from CGI are probably are taking a pretty nice holiday right about now.
ck2 13y ago
This very same article was on the front page all day today. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6526761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6526761 HealthCare.gov cost $93.7 million, which is still outrageous.
- joe_the_user 13y ago
  If your link contains a proof the figure is only $93.7 million, the proof is currently buried deeply. Perhaps you could link directly.
  - threeseed 13y ago
    "the bulk of which ($88 million) went to CGI Federal, the company awarded a $93.7 million contract to build Healthcare.gov and other technology portions of the FFEs" That is from the article.
    - timhargis 13y ago
      That was the original quote it said - since then it's exceeded $500 million... "We, the taxpayers, seem to have forked up more than $500 million of the federal purse to build the digital equivalent of a rock."
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
- timhargis 13y ago
  Looks like they adjusted the figure - earlier it was at $634 million from what I saw but now it looks like it's closer to $500 million. Regardless, it's still a ridiculous amount...
  - oscilloscope 13y ago
    The cost of the Iraq War was over $800 billion. Over a ten year period, I would expect the cost of national healthcare to be on the order of ~1 trillion dollars. $500 million is 0.05% of $1 trillion.
JessicaSWilliam 13y ago
============================== ==============================upto I looked at the check of $5108, I didnt believe that...my... friend woz like they say trully earning money part time on their apple labtop.. there aunt haz done this for only 22 months and as of now paid for the morgage on there condo and got a brand new Land Rover Range Rover. go to my blog ============================== WWW.Works23.Com =============================
1945 13y ago
That's a drop in the bucket when you compare it to the 1.4 trillion spent funding the ~12 year war on terror. What I'm saying is I'd much rather see the money spent on healthcare.
- ekianjo 13y ago
  I'd rather see that money not spent at all.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  It may have escaped your attention but currently web dev is not considered a medical profession. I suppose one could say that they would rather see the money spent on healthcare bureaucracy, but that's a bit of a weaker statement I guess.
  - 1945 13y ago
    Of course this notion never cross my mind. What I was eluding to was money spent facilitating healthcare is money well spent, even if they overspent. After all, we are talking about the U.S. Government.
- cynwoody 13y ago
  Agreed. But not by the government. $1.4 trillion spent by millions of consumers in a free market will produce far better healthcare than $1.4 trillion spent by the USG. When it comes to making choices, the market is far, far more efficient than the political system. As for the drop in the bucket, it was to produce a web app by which those millions of consumers are supposed to find health care plans, not actual health care. The drop in the bucket is a miserable failure! It should serve as an index of what to expect from the system, as currently constituted. There should be no USG health care site. Consumers should be free to type "health care" in their search bar and select the best one they find. High deductible or low deductible. Across state lines. Birth control covered or not. Mental or not. It should be like choosing a smart phone. And the government's role should be limited to keeping the suppliers honest.
jaggederest 13y ago
Think of the company you could build - build one federal website for all of your seed, A, B, and C rounds of funding in one bundle, with no equity loss.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
threeseed 13y ago
RTFA everyone. The website cost $93.7m. The rest of the money went to infrastructure, call centre, collection services and building out the state based exchanges.
- dave_sullivan 13y ago
  Now to be fair... $93.7m at $170 per hour is 551,176 billable hours. Now, it's certainly not a one man job--maybe a team of 20 ought to do it? That leaves 27,558 hours per person. Divide that by 40 and it looks like you're going to be running a team of 20 for 688 weeks at 40 hours per week of billable hours. 688 weeks is 13 years. So that amount will get you a team of 20 working for 13 years straight. Bump it up to a team of 40 and you get 6.5 years. Regardless, I'm in the wrong business...
  - jakejake 13y ago
    The calculations also work out for a team of 30 working for $50/hour and 5 guys with really large yachts
    - stefan_kendall 13y ago
      This tracks with other government contracts I've heard about. Although it's usually 2-3 guys with a couple yachts. And I'm not kidding about the yachts. Actual confirmed yacht purchases.
  - yen223 13y ago
    One thing I learnt, corporate IT believes in quantity over quality. It's definitely more than 20 people - I would guess maybe 200 people worked on the project.
  - gte910h 13y ago
    You're not looking at most of what it's doing even though: LARGE scale inter-operation with hideous legacy systems (dozens of them).
dmazin 13y ago
A bit too meta maybe, but that's a great headline. Because who the hell is getting that commission? Where are the people making this magical money?
JacksonGariety 13y ago
$500 million and it still has scheduled maintenance: https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/registration https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/registra...
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
incanus77 13y ago
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...
rebelidealist 13y ago
The irony is the CTO of the US Todd Park founded two Health IT companies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Park http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Park
learc83 13y ago
"the bulk of which ($88 million) went to CGI Federal, the company awarded a $93.7 million contract to build Healthcare.gov and other technology portions of the FFEs" What are the "other technology portions". If part of the other technology is building the infrastructure to allow hundreds of insurance companies to access very sensitive data from millions of customers, then that number seems a lot more reasonable.
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...

53 points by timhargis 13y ago

gexla 13y ago

Of course it's over budget. Once you get past the $100 million mark for a web app, your estimation skills start breaking down a bit. But it's good when you have a client who can print money and the private players in the DOD as inspiration. Why not go over budget? You aren't doing a government contract right unless you are going way over budget. I would love to send out an invoice for over $100 million. Even better would be to pick up the phone and tell the government that you are burning through the cash and you will need another $100 million to keep going. Who is their senior developer? Kobe Bryant? Their development team? The L.A. Lakers? "Sorry, Kobe is refusing to write another line of code until we renew his contract."

philfreo 13y ago

Serious question... where does all that money go? Are a few people personally making many millions off this deal? Or are there really hundreds or thousands of employees working on it? Or is it getting subcontracted out many times with each layer taking a slice?

jakejake 13y ago
I'd imagine it's a gravy train gig all around. The payoff can be very large, but the government makes you jump through all manner of hoops at every stage of the way. I've actually done government work at the state level (ironically working on healthcare systems) and it's crazy how difficult it is to get anything accomplished. To start with the proposal process is extremely intense and only a small number of companies have the resources to even apply for a project like this. The system I worked on was more simple than this and our proposal documentation was hundreds of pages. With this being such a hot political issue, I can't even imagine the politics going on behind the scenes on top of any technical challenges. The number of meetings and reviews was probably astronomical. I have no doubt that some principles at CGI are making huge profits off of projects like these, but it's not totally free money as it might seem.

dude3 13y ago

I went to CGI's website. It says offshoring. The javascript on healthcare.gov looks like they hired someone on Odesk.

mithras 13y ago
All those millions still go to the lowest bidder.
rozap 13y ago
Yea I don't think the programmers got the cash. Though I'll bet some executives from CGI are probably are taking a pretty nice holiday right about now.

ck2 13y ago

This very same article was on the front page all day today. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6526761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6526761 HealthCare.gov cost $93.7 million, which is still outrageous.

joe_the_user 13y ago
If your link contains a proof the figure is only $93.7 million, the proof is currently buried deeply. Perhaps you could link directly.
- threeseed 13y ago
  "the bulk of which ($88 million) went to CGI Federal, the company awarded a $93.7 million contract to build Healthcare.gov and other technology portions of the FFEs" That is from the article.
  - timhargis 13y ago
    That was the original quote it said - since then it's exceeded $500 million... "We, the taxpayers, seem to have forked up more than $500 million of the federal purse to build the digital equivalent of a rock."
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
timhargis 13y ago
Looks like they adjusted the figure - earlier it was at $634 million from what I saw but now it looks like it's closer to $500 million. Regardless, it's still a ridiculous amount...
- oscilloscope 13y ago
  The cost of the Iraq War was over $800 billion. Over a ten year period, I would expect the cost of national healthcare to be on the order of ~1 trillion dollars. $500 million is 0.05% of $1 trillion.

JessicaSWilliam 13y ago

============================== ==============================upto I looked at the check of $5108, I didnt believe that...my... friend woz like they say trully earning money part time on their apple labtop.. there aunt haz done this for only 22 months and as of now paid for the morgage on there condo and got a brand new Land Rover Range Rover. go to my blog ============================== WWW.Works23.Com =============================

1945 13y ago

That's a drop in the bucket when you compare it to the 1.4 trillion spent funding the ~12 year war on terror. What I'm saying is I'd much rather see the money spent on healthcare.

ekianjo 13y ago
I'd rather see that money not spent at all.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
It may have escaped your attention but currently web dev is not considered a medical profession. I suppose one could say that they would rather see the money spent on healthcare bureaucracy, but that's a bit of a weaker statement I guess.
- 1945 13y ago
  Of course this notion never cross my mind. What I was eluding to was money spent facilitating healthcare is money well spent, even if they overspent. After all, we are talking about the U.S. Government.
cynwoody 13y ago
Agreed. But not by the government. $1.4 trillion spent by millions of consumers in a free market will produce far better healthcare than $1.4 trillion spent by the USG. When it comes to making choices, the market is far, far more efficient than the political system. As for the drop in the bucket, it was to produce a web app by which those millions of consumers are supposed to find health care plans, not actual health care. The drop in the bucket is a miserable failure! It should serve as an index of what to expect from the system, as currently constituted. There should be no USG health care site. Consumers should be free to type "health care" in their search bar and select the best one they find. High deductible or low deductible. Across state lines. Birth control covered or not. Mental or not. It should be like choosing a smart phone. And the government's role should be limited to keeping the suppliers honest.

jaggederest 13y ago

Think of the company you could build - build one federal website for all of your seed, A, B, and C rounds of funding in one bundle, with no equity loss.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

threeseed 13y ago

RTFA everyone. The website cost $93.7m. The rest of the money went to infrastructure, call centre, collection services and building out the state based exchanges.

dave_sullivan 13y ago
Now to be fair... $93.7m at $170 per hour is 551,176 billable hours. Now, it's certainly not a one man job--maybe a team of 20 ought to do it? That leaves 27,558 hours per person. Divide that by 40 and it looks like you're going to be running a team of 20 for 688 weeks at 40 hours per week of billable hours. 688 weeks is 13 years. So that amount will get you a team of 20 working for 13 years straight. Bump it up to a team of 40 and you get 6.5 years. Regardless, I'm in the wrong business...
- jakejake 13y ago
  The calculations also work out for a team of 30 working for $50/hour and 5 guys with really large yachts
  - stefan_kendall 13y ago
    This tracks with other government contracts I've heard about. Although it's usually 2-3 guys with a couple yachts. And I'm not kidding about the yachts. Actual confirmed yacht purchases.
- yen223 13y ago
  One thing I learnt, corporate IT believes in quantity over quality. It's definitely more than 20 people - I would guess maybe 200 people worked on the project.
- gte910h 13y ago
  You're not looking at most of what it's doing even though: LARGE scale inter-operation with hideous legacy systems (dozens of them).

dmazin 13y ago

A bit too meta maybe, but that's a great headline. Because who the hell is getting that commission? Where are the people making this magical money?

JacksonGariety 13y ago

$500 million and it still has scheduled maintenance: https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/registration https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/registra...

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

incanus77 13y ago

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...

rebelidealist 13y ago

The irony is the CTO of the US Todd Park founded two Health IT companies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Park http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Park

learc83 13y ago

"the bulk of which ($88 million) went to CGI Federal, the company awarded a $93.7 million contract to build Healthcare.gov and other technology portions of the FFEs" What are the "other technology portions". If part of the other technology is building the infrastructure to allow hundreds of insurance companies to access very sensitive data from millions of customers, then that number seems a lot more reasonable.

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...