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.
simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Or to put it another way, the procurement process selects contractors who thrive in the presence of bureaucracy, not those who actually deliver quality products on time and on budget. This is a well-known and long-standing problem.
Re:simple (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:simple (Score:5, Insightful)
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The government tit is about the opposite of an efficient operation. You have a nominal bid process, but that's the only throttle on the spending.
Everything else after that is how cleverly you can whine and obfuscate and exaggerate. There is no investor looking for a return. Oddly, some view that as a feature. Fair enough, but don't expect efficiency.
It's not just a little wasteful, but wasteful by a magnitude. There used to be a joke in the farm bureau where a local manager would exclaim, "Oh no! My f
Re:simple (Score:5, Funny)
So all government contracts go to female African-American small business owners who are veterans? No wonder the government doesn't get anything done, the poor women must be totally overworked.
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:simple (Score:4, Interesting)
Government contracting is a bear and adds at least 30% inefficiency to the process for a small project; can't say on a large project but I imagine the percentage remains fairly constant. Just dealing with the timesheets and accounting is a nightmare.
BUT, to the GP's point, successful government contractors are the ones that have project managers whose sole purpose is to bastardize scope to justify additional services along every step of the way. They trap you into the additional work; it is an art in a way.
As to the WMBE participation, it does lead to abuses, but the idea is that it keeps *everything* from being centralized into a company like Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman, and instead makes them spread things out at worst, and gives competition at best.
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:simple (Score:4, Interesting)
Note that this also tends to happen with huge corporations - they waste a lot of money - but they have a sharper limit than the government because they can't do the taxing & money-creation thing.
Re:simple (Score:5, Insightful)
I've put in many RFQs on government dollars at universities, national labs, and private businesses (I've never been a direct employee of the government). All the law requires is that I get a quote (which usually turns out to be a no-bid) from a minority or woman owned business, and if that quote comes in over, the money still goes to the lowest bidder. The only extra cost is my time in getting another quote. Fair enough.
Pretty much every extra cost that I see comes about because someone abused the system in that specific way that the rule addresses. You can simply look at the process and see, ah, that rule or requirement was instituted because someone was either dumb or dishonest. No matter how rare or unlikely to occur again, however, the bureaucracy will institute a rule or procedure. Because that's what bureacracies do, private or public.
Toss in empire-building and that explains most of it. Though honestly the national labs have been far better places to work than the businesses or universities. Businesses are just as subject to these tides of human behavior as governments. They're just not as transparent, and you get fired for making them public.
I'm not saying this was that Healthcare.gov was the most efficient use of resources ever. On the other hand, the Facebook comparison is ludicrous. FB didn't have to serve 40 million users on day one; they got to scale up slowly. HC.gov is in the unenviable position of having to have a system which will handle millions of users (and almost certainly an overload) the moment it opens, then never having to handle that great a load again. In addition to having to do it in a way that absolutely protects the users HIPAA PII (so don't say cloud), unlike FB, which is in the business of making PII public and faces no penalties if it gets hacked.
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resources['ffe.ee.shared.formValidator.eeSSN'] = 'This Social Security number (SSN) isn't valid.';
Gee, see any problem there? I do. This is a rank newbie mistake. And I do mean rank. As in: it reeks. And this same BAD error is repeated in a great many places. There are about 2,725 lines of code, formatted. And at
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http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/13123-gao-35-of-federal-contract-dollars-went-to-minority-owned-businesses [thenewamerican.com]
http://www.fedmarket.com/contractors/Minority%252dOwned-Business-Contracting [fedmarket.com]
http://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/186661 [gsa.gov]
In a nutshell at least 5% of a contract must be awarded by quota. It is certainly out in the open, there are entire government programs devoted to helping make sure this happens.
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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.
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As someone currently working on the implementation of a State-based exchange (in one of the 14 States taking that path), I agree. We have our own issues with the project and not everything was working correctly on go-live date. However, in comparison to the Federal exchange site, we are doing pretty well.
The big issues we have faced are:
1. Complexity - these exchanges need to integrate with half a dozen other State and Federal systems (e.g. Federal data hub to pull IRS/tax data) all with wildly differing da
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?
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Yep, I met a government contractor at a party, and he told me to put my business under my wife who is hispanic and rake in the cash. I just can't bring myself to do it though.
Re:simple (Score:4, Insightful)
How about using a minor past injury in military prep school to claim disabled veteran status?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr1kwC0je1Y [youtube.com]
I do think it's useful to make a distinction between preferences being used in a corrupt way, and preferences actually benefitting those they are aimed at helping.
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If you think that the "women, minorities, veterans preference" means anything at all in the real world, please give some examples. Good luck.
What, are you kidding? Look at the rules and regulations for awarding grants and contracts. SBIRs [nih.gov] are a good place to start. There are quotas in place whose stated purpose is to incentivize the award of government money to businesses owned by women and minorities. Let me emphasize this: such an outcome is the declared aims of these rules. Government grants and contract
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"we received a ton of (mostly worthless to us as a business but very expensive) consulting help"
Your tax dollars hard at work, ladies and gentlemen.
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As with many things, the government ends up doing stuff like this because the public pushes for it regardless of the consequences, and then c
operators reversed. money == ! technically compete (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems to me that the larger the bill and the larger the company sending that bill, the lower the competency.
Our three-person company handles web sites serving hundreds of thousands of users per day for a few thousand dollars. We could easily handle a few million users by adding a few more database servers at a cost of around ten thousand.
Re:simple (Score:5, Interesting)
Plenty of talented developers and teams get crushed by government red tape, bureaucracy, and the simple inability of most government agencies to manage their contracts. I can't figure out why but there is an enormous attraction for government program managers to micro-manage. Having worked on a handful of very expensive, very large government programs I can tell you that either side can make a project a disaster. But I've been on teams that can roll out a successful commercial project in 3 months that takes 3 years for nearly identical functionality in the public sector (DoD in my case). It's not incompetence at the individual level, either, in my experience; it's something institutional. Too many regulations that cause inflexibility and twisted risk/reward feedback for both costs and personal performance, and the antithesis of an evolution-as-improvement driven culture to match changing development standards.
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/
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Oh please. Get a real government over spend [afr.com].
Your 670% cost blowout is nothing compared to 20000% cost blowout our government had.
Re:simple (Score:4, Interesting)
That website isn't blowing up because heroic contractors are being stifled by government regulations. It's a pretty crappy UI. It took me forever just to find the actual plan costs and the filtering all (powered by Solara) blows. I'm sure overregulations also aren't the reason they can't handle the traffic they're getting and logins send you to blank pages. The site is so busy trying to explain everything that it obfuscates the 1st things that people want to know; what does it cover and how much does it cost. Try navigating that site to find the difference between the metal plans to see what I mean.
I talked to Experian which is involved in user validation (and where I bet a lot of that $634M is going) and it turns out that on failed validation attempts (which must be another bug in their code) aren't even being submitted to them manually for about a day. So, when it invariably blows up, you've got to wait that long to complete your application.
I'm not saying there's no government red tape driving the website design, but I think the whole site has major problems on the macro- and micro-levels that I can't imagine are because "that's how the law said to do it."
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Except it is. The red tape prevents many of the more competent contractors to not even bother.
Yes, the direct result is not caused by red tape, but indirectly the red tape certainly had an enormous affect on the pool of available talent.
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It's really, really simple, in a way. The rules and their interactions form a basis of a more complex set of behaviors that emerge when you start executing them.
It's like with ants: a single ant is pretty dumb. But put them together, and you've got beautiful emergent behavior. In case of bureaucracy, you've got a bunch of "intelligent", "well meaning" simple rules. Put them together, and the emergent behavior is a pile of crap. It's like why IP internetworking won over X.25.
Both the behavior of ants and the
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I recently worked on a project that cost >$40 million for a site which is never going to have more than about 20 thousand users.
Cost depends on the the complexity of the business logic, the number of systems that need to be integrated, the amount of hardware that is required to perform complex calculations and algorithms, etc.
Comparing it to the early days of facebook is spurious - facebook is just a messaging and photo-sharing site,
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I guarantee you FaceBook uses more complex logic than required for the healthcare site.
What the hell (Score:2)
Why was 90+ million dollars budgeted for the development of one freaking website?
A deal at twice the price (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, the issue right now is not the cost of the thing but whether any amount of money can make it healthy in the required time.
If this thing doesn't get right, "they" might have to wave the fine/penalty/tax to be payed by people who didn't sign up, which is why there is a political fight right now "shutting down the government"?
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In light of the importance of this project, the thing is cheap at 600 million
No, it is still overpriced for the job it is doing. Other businesses have built websites of greater complexity, with heavier loads for a lot less money.
Re:A deal at twice the price (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd be curious about this greater complexity assertion. A large part of the project requirement is that it effectively and securely pulls data from a large number of already existing government systems. In my experience, dealing with those kind of externalities is most often neither easy nor cheap... and certainly pretty darned complex. What are you comparing it to?
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Except that scraping publically available data, while non trivial (assuming it's in diverse formats, anyway) isn't handling that data securely. At least many of the servers this has to be pulling from absolutely must handle data securely - it'd be kind of bad if you could use the interface exposed for this to randomly pull up IRS data on anyone for whom you had a SSN and mother's maiden name, wouldn't it? Not even to get into medical information, which has specific legal protections.
I'm not trying, BTW, to
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Well and that if the only people who buy insurance are the ones who "really, REALLY" need insurance (i.e. those with major health problems) the whole system will go into a death spiral. Rather more serious than pettiness or obstinancy.
Re:A deal at twice the price (Score:5, Insightful)
For a system of this size, It's expensive. I agree with GP, $600 million is pretty cheap for a system intended to serviced over 100,000,000 people. Less than $6 a user is a pretty good deal.
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$6 per user is insanely expensive. Facebook has over a billion users and they didn't spend near this much getting Facebook running, and it has much more functionality than the healthcare website will have.
Where do they have the figure that 100 million people will use this site? Only 45 million are reportedly without i
Re:A deal at twice the price (Score:5, Informative)
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Employing one of the three top consulting houses was probably what sunk it. They are big bureaucracies that mirror the government, really. Just think what those consulting houses do: they help clients who are clueless enough not to be able to do the work themselves. If the client can't do the work, you think they'll know enough to gauge consultant's performance? Nope.
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100m people, but not all at the same time. Aside from the initial rush, day to day traffic would be comparatively minimal. You don't need the hardware sitting around to support 100 million people every single day. Don't be silly.
So spend the money to develop the architecture and software properly, then provision servers on an as-needed basis during the demand spikes. Servers from AWS or some other provider would provide capacity and cut back on costs.
You should check into the site on the first few days like
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Re:What the hell (Score:5, Insightful)
It came from middle-middle-middlemen. We've privatized the hell out of a lot of important tasks that the federal government does in the name of making them cheaper, but I think every single person in our industry can tell you that contractors are expensive as hell, and add nothing but immediacy.
So, we pay full time people in the government to review contract bids. Those contractors are specialists in winning government contracts, and do nothing other than hire sub-contractors. Those subcontractors hire actual employees, but only a trickle of the money they make goes to paying for the work. They take a huge overhead for legal, HR, actual overhead, and profits. The parent contractor takes a similar huge cut before passing things on to subcontractors.
We've already multiplied the actual costs by 10 or more, without having even brought "overruns", "missed requirements", and real QA into the picture.
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Most of the cost is probably salaries and infrastructure equipment. It appears they should have spent more on developer time.
Re:What the hell (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What the hell (Score:5, Insightful)
One website, that's expected to have incredibly heavy loads[...]
Well here's the rub. In regular operation, the loads aren't going to be incredibly high. They'll be "very" high, but not ridiculously. You could argue that their single largest mistake was trying to do a massive roll out to everyone in the country all at once. They should have rolled out to a small number of people, worked the kinks out and come back in a month with a slightly larger roll out. Rinse and repeat until it's available for everyone and you have some idea what your actual day to day usage numbers are going to be.
Re:What the hell (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:What the hell (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's not just 'one freaking website'. There's a HUGE backend with financials, a full customer management system, integrations with dozens of other systems and data sources etc. The public facing website part of it is like 5% of the work, if that.
Rather early to call the site a failure, isn't it? (Score:5, Insightful)
We need to wait until it has been up for a while before we go around calling it a failure.
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Re:Rather early to call the site a failure, isn't (Score:5, Insightful)
Handling what is potentially HIPAA-covered data? Much harder to do than just working with credit card information.
Re:Rather early to call the site a failure, isn't (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Rather early to call the site a failure, isn't (Score:5, Insightful)
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How many of those were 304 not modified? And how large were they? I don't know but no one else seems to except one guy who does web design, and apparently knows little to none about servers.
All of that happens client side, making his DOS comment ridiculous. He did not say that caching was disabled, and did not give a byte count. I'm discounting the whole report until I have time to look myself.
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How many of those were 304 not modified? ...
All of that happens client side, making his DOS comment ridiculous.
First, 304 headers are generated by servers when a client requests a page that has not been modified since the last access date reported by the client. Clients don't generate those headers themselves, so, no, its not all client side.
Now if you understand how DDOS attacks work (All they do is open a LOT of connections), then you'll understand that having 50 or 75 separate links in your page, even if they ALL get cached, will still cause 50 or 75 separate connections just so your server can tell the client "
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Just wait until they actually start managing your health care.
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Except that there are services nowadays SPECIFICALLY built for this type of scaling, like AWS. You can spin up extra servers for temporary high traffic - especially high traffic that was absolutely foreseen. Funny how Amazon's website can handle the traffic on black Friday just fine.
Sorry, but I've been doing web development for 15 years and have worked on large projects. I can't see the cost for this project being more than $20-30M for up-front development (that includes planning, documentation, meetings,
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I have insurance through my employer and they have no intentions of cancelling. That said, I was curious about plans and premiums and chose to check it out. It has now been a week, and I have only been able to get to the Contact Infomation screen before i get the Unknown Error message. It took me 3 days to create an account alone without error. I have tried IE, Chrome, and finally caved into trying Firefox as well...and the site problems are not browser-related. They are coding-related. As of today, I am st
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The plans are too expensive for poor people. This government healthcare stuff has made healthcare much, much more expensive. I mean back in the day I had a $10 deductible with full coverage for everything and I paid $348/mo. Now I'm paying $20/mo for my employer-supplied CDHP that gives me an HSA I can add $3500 per year to pre-tax, meaning I save about 30% on everything from bandages and antihistamines to Target clinic visits and emergency surgery. On top of that, the HSA covers anything beyond a $3,50
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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.
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You're of course assuming that the purpose is the same as it's stated purpose, to work, rather than funnel money that used to go to the Good 'ol Boys to the Good New Boys.
The Bottom lines is we pay $5 - 5.5K per capita for health care or $ 1.57 - 1.727 trillion, just add the DOD budget to the Medicare/Medicaid and the difference is a measley $200B of chump change; anything that doesn't gut the DOD is just liberal feel-good smoke and mirrors. Middle-class People are reporting their quotes on the exchanges ar
Job$! (Score:2)
Complete nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
This figure is not just for building a website.
It is for all spending with CGI Federal over the time that they have been doing business with the Federal government, including payments from fiscal years before Obamacare was even passed.
The figure is now being regurgitated by various right wing websites without anything that even passes for thinking.
And also now slashdot, which is disappointing.
Re:Complete nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Car analogy. Reference Katrina. Site other blogs. Media fear words. Kittens.
Look at the contract data (Score:3)
Half Nonsense. Still a quarter billion dollar site (Score:3)
This figure is not just for building a website.
It is for all spending with CGI Federal over the time that they have been doing business with the Federal government, including payments from fiscal years before Obamacare was even passed.
The figure is now being regurgitated by various right wing websites without anything that even passes for thinking.
And also now slashdot, which is disappointing.
If you chase the links to the original treasury website, half of the $634 million was paid after the passage of the 'Affordable' Care Act, so I'm especially interested in the specifics of those contracts- which are still more than triple the $93 million dollar original ACA website contract.
So perhaps it's a $300 mil website instead of $600 mil. That's not really much of an improvement, to be honest.
"No, it's all lies! The website only cost a bit over a quarter-billion dollars!"
We do have to find out m
DAMN STRAIGHT!!! (Score:4, Funny)
What right wing sites, liberal???
There are no right wing sites. All of the sites, and the entire media, are left wing and biased. It is a constant attack on our principles, our freedoms, and America by the entire universe, and reality, which has an unfair liberal bias! Why do you hate freedom, liberal? Why do you hate prosperity? Can't you see that there are only a few conservatives (read, glorious defenders of freedom) left, and that the brave ones who speak out are shot? GLORY, GLORY HALLELUJAH! We shall prevail in the end!
Not true - that is a total for _all_ contracts (Score:5, Insightful)
What of the mission? (Score:3)
This statement alone is scarier, than whatever was leaked by Mr. Snowden. Surprisingly, the President's cheerleaders — normally so suspect of government's invasions into our privacy — ignore this implication.
Gravity of the mission, whatever it is, has little to do with the cost of implementation. First step on the Moon was a gravely important mission, b
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First step on the Moon was a gravely important mission, but it was easy for Neil Armstrong to do it...
Great point. You win.
HITECH act NOT Affordable Care. (Score:5, Insightful)
The solicitation number linked to actually refers to the HITECH act, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, to quote health it.gov:
The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act seeks to improve American health care delivery and patient care through an unprecedented investment in Health IT (HIT).
And it certainly sound like they've achieved an unprecedented investment at least.
Comment removed (Score:3)
"Fat Cat" system (Score:2)
Everything done by the government costs 3-4x more because government contracts are a way to grease the hands of people who favors are owed to
Because. Government Job. (Score:2)
The US government is not known to be thrifty when it comes to spending. Big guns, deep pockets, no fucks given.
misappropriation? (Score:2)
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.
Investment != Expenditures (Score:2)
The comparison to Facebook is complete BS.
Even though (as somebody already pointed out) the $634m number doesn't represent just Healthcare.gov, the comparison to Facebook is completely fallacious. Facebook has money coming in other than just their investments; the investment money that is referenced in the Crunchbase page is in addition to any other income that they had. In other words, Facebook spent way more than $634m in that period of time.
Lazy journalism at its best.
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]
Pure Beuaracracy (Score:4, Insightful)
This is pure bureaucratic inefficiency work at it's finest. Some examples if this is like a typical Federal contract would include things like:
Changing specs on what your asking for multiple times throughout. You start building to one spec and part way through things change to another spec requiring expensive redesigns. Case studies have been written and college courses taught about the sheer number of design changes on why certain federal programs that have run billions of dollars over.
Too many chiefs calling the shots which requires too many chiefs answering for the shots being called. For political purposes you can have people from any number of agencies and or divisions within an agency all trying to design the thing. Almost none of them have a clue what their doing, but they'll pretend to be a designer just because they can. The resulting quagmire can cause committee upon committee just to get things approved at any given level and in case you missed someone that feels overlooked they can bring the whole thing to a grinding halt just to remind everyone not to overlook their office.
If your the Federal Government your allowed, in fact your - required - to use racism and sexism when bidding things out. Anyone that is involved with government contracts is well aware of this and as a result contractors that meet the discrimination guidelines get selected over those that don't even when they cost significantly more. When your guaranteed to get a job even when your charging more money, do you think someone is going charge the market rate or their chosen rate?
Politics, don't forget about politics as the new administration gets in and typically wants to kills anything that was a signature of the old. If you think life is difficult with inter office politics, imagine having powerful senators and governors doing everything they can to run interference on your project.
This is only a small smidgen of reasons why these things run costs that are sky high as they are and part of the reasons why you see Republicans want to cut government spending. They look at something like this and say, the private sector would do this in a fourth the time for a fourth the cost (not taking sides, just explaining their logic).
Same as the Canadian national gun registry (Score:5, Informative)
Summary Very Wrong (Score:3)
The summary is misleading to the point where I think it's deliberate:
Lets look at "Not only is this more than Facebook spent during its first 6 years in operation"
This is worded like it's comparing the cumulative cost of Facebook's first 6 years to the ~3 years that Healthcare.gov has been in development. But they're actually talking about the annual cost of Facebook compared to the cumulative cost of Healthcare.gov. As for Facebooks annual cost Facebook spent 449M in 2010, 1.1B in 2011, and 3.19B in 2012 [marketwatch.com]. FB also has the advantage of a far slower rollout, dealing with far less sensitive data, and needing far less integration with other systems so it's unclear if it's a valid comparison for things other than load.
There's another whopper in "it is also over $500 million above what the original estimate was: $93.7 million". So lets look at what the article actually said:
Take that out, and you’re left with roughly $363 million spent on technology-related costs to the healthcare exchanges – 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.
So Healthcare.gov was never supposed to cost $93.7 million, only the contract to CGI to write the code was $93.7 million, the rest of the numbers had nothing to do with that.
There's certainly issues with Healthcare.gov but this story looks like a partisan plant to me.
Re: (Score:2)
Should have mentioned that they make their money off of inventing problems after the contract is signed.
Re: (Score:2)
There are far too many requirements on government that actually often forces
Re:An Overarching Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Active duty military who get paid very little to defend the country, and VA staff.
Re: (Score:3)
Every military person I've known have done it for the free college money they give out. The military basically buys service with tax dollars. These kids don't generally go die for free and if they do it's because they were brainwashed into nationalistic American exceptionalism.
Working at the VA is a huge credit on anyone's resume, especially in the Neurology/Medical sciences field. It's hard to get in there but a huge bonus if you can claim that experience.
People are inherently selfish but I will admit ther
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.
Re:It's called "padding" (Score:4, Insightful)
Not so, It is not "padding" per se. However, this is the general way federal government acquisitions work (at least in the DoD). Staff member gets 3 quotes from vendors and submits to contracting office. Contracting office goes to their GSA-approved buddy. GSA buddy sends purchase request through 3 layers of GSA approved subcontractors. Each layer adds their markup. Last one in the chain ships product to staff member at highly inflated price. Each layer of GSA-approved vendors get their cut for doing nothing (except the last guy who shipped it), and the product cost 3 times as much. Now, contracting officers have nice new job waiting for them upon retirement from civil service, and free cash was distributed to those who can game the GSA system.
Re: (Score:2)
I guess this was voted down because EVERYONE knows that the US Government has NO vendor management.
Re:Badly (Score:5, Insightful)
As opposed to the health insurance industry, which is a billion dollar a year boondoggle whose only functions are to determine who gets billed for what, and to deny benefits in order to increase "shareholder value".
Even fairly incompetent governments around the world have been shown to be able to manage a single-payer system without it becoming such a drain on the GDP.
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.
Re: (Score:3)
I see this comparison a lot, so let's dive into it.
http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/fb/financials
Facebook had a COGS cost of 1.36 billion, and a R&D cost of 1.4 billion. Since they basically only operate a web site, that's all the cost of operating a web site. So to 2.76 billion dollars in a single year spent on Facebook.com.
Healthcare.gov spent 614 million over three years. At $200 million a year, that's roughly in line with Facebook's spending level back in 2009.
And Facebook has never gon