Cost of Healthcare.gov: $634 Million — So Far 497
First time accepted submitter Saethan writes "Healthcare.gov, the site to be used by people in 36 states to get insurance as part of the Affordable Care Act, has apparently cost the U.S. Government $634 million. Not only is this more than Facebook spent during its first 6 years in operation, it is also over $500 million above what the original estimate was: $93.7 million. Why, in a country with some of the best web development companies in the world, has this website, which is poor quality at best, cost so much?" That $634 million figure comes from this U.S. government budget-tracking system. Given that this system is national rather than for a single city, maybe everyone should just be grateful the contract didn't go to TechnoDyne.
Several reasons (Score:5, Informative)
One: Schedule Fail. Compounded by late award of the contracts to develop/influence:
Contracts Awarded Dec 2011 [wsj.com]
Two: massive requirements base to develop specification for development and implementation: The PPACA was 1800+ pages, and the associated regulations are 10,000+ pages, and are STILL changing. Can't develop without a spec and design, with big parts of requirements still changing.
Three: inadequate testing. The above-referenced link states that security testing BEGAN in August 2013, less than two months before rollout. There's no mention of load testing
Four: Integration issues. The Obamacare Exchange system combines data from numerous agencies and systems, and integrating between them is always a difficult task
Five: Identity-management. This is in parallel to Integration, somehow all identities need to be federated into a single overarching system.
Twenty-three months, even with a top-flight team, would simply not be enough to do this: this is a 5-7 year job. . .
Obama versus Bush healthcare rollout (Score:4, Informative)
Exchange launch turns into inexcusable mess: Our view [usatoday.com]
Park said the administration expected 50,000 to 60,000 simultaneous users. It got 250,000. Compare that with the similarly rocky debut seven years ago of exchanges to obtain Medicare drug coverage. The Bush administration projected 20,000 simultaneous users and built capacity for 150,000.
That's the difference between competence and incompetence.
The too-much-demand excuse also is less than the full story. In addition to grossly underestimating demand, the administration and its contractors seem to have made mistakes in building the websites. The system for verifying consumer identity has had persistent problems, as have pull-down menus.
Nor were problems confined to the 36 state health exchanges run by the federal government. Sites run by 14 states and Washington, D.C., bogged down because they have to refer to federal databases to verify consumers' identity.
Re:Everything the government does... (Score:1, Informative)
But the government itself did not make the website. The website development was contracted out to a PRIVATE company...
Re:An Overarching Problem (Score:4, Informative)
The real problem is that NOBODY, in ANY branch of the U.S. government, gives a shit about anything other than enriching themselves.
I cordially invite ANY evidence to the contrary.
If you are talking about politicians I'll agree with you. However if you are talking about government employees I have to tel you to taking a flying F@&K, as you have no idea what you are talking about. I am working without pay at this time. I don't know when I will be paid thanks to the shutdown, but that hasn't stopped me from doing my job.
Comparison to Facebook a teensy bit misleading (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a nice overview of just what's going on with the ACA website. The chart from Xerox illustrates why the system is a just a teensy bit more complicated than Facebook. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/09/heres-everything-you-need-to-know-about-obamacares-error-plagued-web-sites/ [washingtonpost.com]
Re:simple (Score:5, Informative)
If you think that the "women, minorities, veterans preference" means anything at all in the real world, please give some examples. Good luck.
I knew a guy who worked for a guy who incorporated a business using his wife as the "owner" and he got numerous subsidies for the business because it was owned by a woman.
Something like that?
It's more about Education Of Workforce (Score:5, Informative)
That's a part of it. The largest part in the evaluation is education of work force. Not a lot of rank and file programmers in the US get more than a bachelors degree. Why would they? Unless you're doing work with advanced algorithms or some sort of management there aren't a lot of drivers to have the additional education.
Because of the weight contracts have on education you see a lot of folks with unrelated degrees and foreign diploma mills. That leads to poor final output.
On a campaign level the administration knows how to put together software quickly. But that's not the way the law allows the gov't to operate. Large contractors have been gaming the bidding process for three decades.
Re:failure...certainly (Score:5, Informative)
Obama ran on the platform that something needed to be done about the millions of people that had no healthcare.
And millions of people are under-impressed by the fact that Obama signed us all up as customers for giant health insurance companies instead of actually doing something to ensure that people get something useful out of the venture.
I guess the only surprising thing is that only a million people tried to sign up. With all of the grass-roots programs encouraging people to sign up, with all of the hype, they should have been expecting traffic of DDOS proportions.
The massive health insurance company bailout act of 2010 (aka affordable care act) does not dictate that everyone has to buy insurance this week. While it does unfortunately have a mandate in it as a massive concession to the health insurance industry that contributes in huge numbers to nearly every politician in Washington, it does at least give a few months before that mandate kicks in. Hence they did not have a good reason to expect every uninsured person to log in in the first week, and indeed that did not happen.
Re:Everything the government does... (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with your idea is that this site was NOT built by the government. It was built by private contractors in a competitive bidding process.
And you want to turn the police over to private contractors?
Lots of other things are done by private contractors for the government. For example most of the defense department procures everything it gets via competitive bidding from private contractors.
Ars Technica Explains (Score:5, Informative)
Ars has a great article up going into more depth of why this happens so often here: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/10/why-us-government-it-fails-so-hard-so-often/
Same as the Canadian national gun registry (Score:5, Informative)
Re:simple (Score:5, Informative)
the government has lots of conditions you have to meet if you want a contract and you have to prove that you meet these conditions preference is given to women, minorities, veterans, small businesses, etc. its not a lowest bidder deal
Notice how everyone points out their favorite political cause as the reason for the failure, while the actual one dwarfs them all by comparison yet goes unnoticed? Anyone who has worked with the government before knows that the main reason everything is so expensive is bureaucratic red tape and auditing.
This is why an LED that costs less than a penny winds up costing the government $50 over its total ownership. I've looked at military contracts; Every LED in the system is individually serialized and tracked. You can't just order a bin of them, and put them on a shelf like you would in a normal factory. Even a ten cent screw has to be vetted through approved vendors, assigned its own serial number, etc. And that's just the screws for the toilet paper holder in the Pentagon. You don't wanna know the kind of process screws destined for fighter jets are subjected to.
So don't say "oh noes, it's because minorities are given preference!" ... which is a patently stupid thing to say anyway since they're paid the same as the non-minorities. That adds very little to the cost -- maybe a .1% bump due to the extra recruiting needed -- unlike the stuff I mentioned, which balloons it to many multiples of what you'd see in the same project in the private sector.
Re:A deal at twice the price (Score:5, Informative)
Re:simple (Score:3, Informative)
You're the one that needs a "citation needed" -- where do you people come up with this stupid shit about minority preferences? The federal law bans such practices, and has ever since Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964.
Supreme Court [cnn.com] heard a case on it and didn't rule that it was illegal. Not sure why you are claiming something like affirmative action doesn't exist.
Department of Labor [dol.gov] has rules to enforce affirmative action.
I'm guessing you are intentionally lying to make a point and were hoping that no one questioned you on it.