Slashdot Mirror
Cost of Healthcare.gov: $634 Million — So Far
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.
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/
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.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
In early 2000's, I was involved in a loan processing project that cost the bank more than $500 million (if inflation adjusted, it would be more than $600 million) that never came on-line because it never really worked. It had similar requirements as the health care site (gather a lot of info from the customer, figure out the best loan option for them), and had much less user load requirements. It also employed one of the three top consulting house to develop it. The government is not the only ones who can screw up a tech project.