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.
Money != contractor knows what it's doing
The site had how many people try to sign up in the first day? If you want to compare it to facebook (a popular metric here no doubt) the number of people who attempted to access and sign up on healthcare.gov in the first day dwarfs the first several years of enrollment at facebook. If they had attempted to build a website to handle the load they faced (which will of course taper off quickly once the first wave of enrollees are signed up and done shopping) we would be bitching that they overbuilt the site because they would have tons of servers sitting mostly idle after the initial surge is done.
We need to wait until it has been up for a while before we go around calling it a failure.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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"?
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.
That figure covers 114 separate contracts (see http://usaspending.gov/explore?tab=By+Prime+Awardee&fiscal_year=all&idvpiid=HHSM500200700015I&typeofview=transactions ) Not to suggest that it still wasn't overly expensive, but consider the fact that the system is a national transaction application that has to dip into numerous other federal data sources - and has a mission criticality above and beyond facebook. Still, many of us could have done it better and cheaper, but then again very few of us would actually enjoy working for the federal government and conducting our business the way any federal contractor is required to.
-- Religion is not an exact science
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.
When a site loads 50+ .js files after you click an 'Apply' button, something is wrong with the design.
Handling what is potentially HIPAA-covered data? Much harder to do than just working with credit card information.
Almost 7 times over budget. And it didn't handle the load placed on it. 8 days later and it's still having problems. And you want to defend it? Oh it's ok that it's a huge steaming pile of crap because why exactly? Do you work at CGI Federal? I could see if it came in on budget. But even then, they obviously did not do any research into how many people would be interested in the site.
"Cowardice in a race, as in an individual, is the unpardonable sin." --Teddy Roosevelt
One website, that's expected to have incredibly heavy loads, will handle personal medical and financial information, and must play suitably well with a ton of third-parties' services while being the target of severe attacks from any foreign government or script kiddy who doesn't like it..
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Active duty military who get paid very little to defend the country, and VA staff.
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.
That's true, and a very good point. I don't work with HIPAA-covered data, but could they use something like amazon's government cloud?
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.
All of which had the luxury of a slow rollout, and don't have anywhere near the same amount of damage done if they're compromised.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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).
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.
Just wait until they actually start managing your health care.
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.
But don't worry: the ACA is going to reduce the deficit.