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.
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.
One: Schedule Fail. Compounded by late award of the contracts to develop/influence:
Contracts Awarded Dec 2011
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. . .
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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 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/
Before it was scrapped, the Canadian government had shelled out over a billion dollars to pay for the federal gun registry. It was initially budgeted to cost a few hundred million. Why the bloat? Because they didn't factor in the cost of every single department and major player having a different computer system, and wanting integration with their systems, and they didn't want their individual departments to pay for it, or have to change their own internal systems. So it all got added into the registry's budget instead.
Magic doesn't work in my presence. My power of disbelief is too strong.