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Why Can't Big Government Launch a Website?
MarkWhittington writes "Glenn Reynolds, the purveyor of Instapundit, asked the pertinent question, 'If big government can put a man on the moon, why can't it put up a simple website without messing it up?' The answer, as it turns out, is a rather simple one. The Apollo program, that President John F. Kennedy mandated to put a man on the moon and return him to the Earth, was a simple idea well carried out for a number of reasons. The primary one was that Congress did not pass a 1,800 or so page bill backed up by a mind-numbing amount of regulations mandating how NASA would do it. The question of how to conduct the lunar voyages was left up to the engineers at NASA and the aerospace industry at the time. The government simply provided the resources necessary to do the job and a certain degree of oversight. Imagine if President Obama had stated, 'I believe the nation should commit itself to the goal of enabling all Americans to access affordable health insurance' but then left the how to do it to some of the best experts in health care and economics without partisan interference."
SIMPLE != LAWYERS
It's complicated because the insurance industry is complicated. It's complicated because we didn't have the political will to simply go for Medicare for all. That would have been simple. Instead, we have this complex cluge that has to work with an even more complex private insurance industry. It actually does make the market for private insurance simpler, but that really isn't saying much.
Do you really think the government could get its act together enough to put a person on the moon again? Have you been paying attention?
Our efforts to land on the moon didn't go smoothly. Also we spent a lot more money to go to the moon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13
Complex problems are complex.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
This post makes it sound like NASA is a private contractor that takes the job out of "the governments" hands, so it can be done properly and efficiently. But that is not the case, you have just provided an example that government organizations can run things efficiently.
Yes, imagine if he or anyone had had the political freedom to leave such a choice to truly non-partisan experts... but he didn't have that freedom, because there are such corporate interests vested in the outcome, with tentacles all into both parties, that such freedom to do so does not exist. If back in Kennedy's day there were numerous huge wealthy corporations with interests in the moon landing NOT happening, or happening on different timetables with different agendas, *and* the liberty to corrupt politics with money had reached the fever pitch it has today, *and* politicians had already given up the idea of even posturing to seem like they had nobility and dignity above that of a Geraldo show, THEN the moon landing might well and truly have been f*cked.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
NASA had it easy. They only had to deal with Physics.
Social Sciences are messy, Social programs are messy and when it involves large groups of people, politicians get involved which makes a services program almost impossible to get right. Given current technology (at the time) there were just a limited number of ways the Moon mission could be completed. Creating a web site in a fractious, antagonist political world had/has too many variables to "get it right". It took close to 10 years to get a man on the moon, and somehow we're suppose to build a complicated heath management system in a few months...It is not a question of expertise, both environments have talent, but it was/is a question of Management, goals, and commitment. NASA employees were vested and proud of their work for they were a part of the whole. CGI Federal *contractors* don't give a shit about the whole, just their slice of the dollar pie. That is why we can put a man on the moon, but can't write a complex web site. (IMHO)
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
Yup, just ask the UK how the NHS upgrade went, 16 Billion spent and then pulled the plug.
Anywhere from 30 to 70% of large IT projects fail, depending on who you ask. Why would the US Government be immune?
You realize the law has a lot of things in it to make Republicans happy right (such as dropping the government option from the plan)? And Republicans decided they'd rather make Obama look bad than make sure people have health coverage right? It would be like if during the Apollo mission Republicans ran congress and kept trying to sabotage the program to make JFK/LBJ look bad.
Just for the sake of perspective, 'big government' didn't "just put a man on the moon", it was an iterative process going all the way back to the experience of the Nazi war criminals we hastily whitewashed, up through a variety of incremental improvements and test designs (along with various accidents, some fatal), until we get to the Apollo missions that everyone actually remembers (and some of those had Issues as well).
Apollo 1 didn't, exactly go so hot(well, it actually went pretty hot indeed), and at least 5 others were killed in jet-based training.
Gemini 8 almost went rather badly, Apollo 12 was struck by lighting, Apollo 13's multiple issues are well known, Apollo 15 had parachute problems.
An assortment of workers and techs have also snuffed it in ground based accidents while working on space launch hardware.
This is not to say that the healthcare.gov rolllout was a success (it wasn't); but website launch failures are pretty boring as failure goes, everyone from small-business intranets up to major web companies seems to fuck them up on occasion. The bigger question will be time-to-fix. To use TFA's own analogy, you could have written "Why can't big government launch a rocket?" when Apollo 1 rather embarassingly caught fire on the ground, reducing the entire crew to charred corpses, because it had been filled with pure oxygen and improperly passivated. As we now know, they can, just not on the first try.
As a federal worker I can tell you that trying to buy something for government use is an extremely byzantine process. An example, if I need to buy a monitor cable, I have to fill out 3 forms (one of them is 14 pages), get four _independent_ approvals, quotes (yes... quotes for a monitor cable), and then follow the documents to make sure nothing gets messed-up along the way. I have to do this for _any_ piece of equipment that is in any way related to information technology. I don't want to describe the process for anything requiring a contract and I can't imagine the amount of work that went into writing the requirements document for a project involving 55 (55!) contracting agencies. The REAL PROBLEM here is the desperate need for contract and purchasing reform in the federal government.
This whole thing is happening because of two reasons: 1) People are afraid of a word: socialism and 2) most of our population has bought into the debate being framed as a false dilemma argument and, so if we have single payer we are therefore a socialist country.
The republicans are right about something for the wrong reasons: we didn't really have a ACA or Obamacare debate. That's because the U.S. doesn't really have *debates* anymore. We allow someone to frame the debate (usually the Republicans, but sometimes the Mass Media) and no one discusses how that frame is causing a logical fallacy.
There is also a 3) many people can't get beyond their own ideologies. Off the record many of the biggest multinationals have told reporters that they have run the numbers and single payer would help them, but they come out because of bias at the boardroom level. Small business would DEFINITELY be helped by single payer as talented people would be more inclined to accept a small business job without the healthcare fear.
Everyone looking to immediately blame this on government should think about what's involved and what probably happened:
1. The contract went to the lowest bidder and/or the firm that could do the most backroom political deals to win. This is not necessarily the team you want doing the work, nor are they necessarily the most capable.
2. It's a huge, monster systems integration challenge. There are probably thousands of XML data brokers, enterprise service buses, web services libraries, and wrappers of wrappers of wrappers of abstraction layers to get the exchange, the insurance companies, the tax records systems used for eligibility verification, the authentication, etc etc etc talking to each other. This is one of the things I do for work on various big systems projects, and it's hard when you have a competent team. When you're dealing with the "offshore delivery centers" of the firm in Point #1 above, it's an absolute nightmare.
3. Every outsourcing contract, public or private sector suffers from the same problem -- it's always more expensive, and the people involved don't have any incentive beyond a paycheck to see it work. I've seen that happen all the time as an FTE in companies overrun by consultants. The consultants don't care what happens as long as they're billing time. If they deliver garbage, so be it, as long as it can be shown that it does what the contract says it does.
4. Continuing with the "don't care" theme, there's also no incentive for the contractor to get it right the first time. Even contracts with penalties for failure or missed dates aren't a big deal because they can bill way more cleaning up the mess they made.
5. I'm sure the "outsourcing partners" weren't forthcoming when the RFP was put out and they saw red flags. Some outsourcers like to trap the customer and have them think everything's sorted, when there's really a huge problem with design/specs/whatever that will mean a very expensive rewrite later on.
6. Any project with a huge red target date on the calendar that is not flexible is doomed to failure. Problems like this lead to stupid things that PMs do like stuff more people onto a late piece of the project where it clearly doesn't help, and it leads to people taking shortcuts to rush it out the door.
7. There was probably immense cost pressure, not from the gov't itself, but from the outsourcer trying to squeeze every nickel out of the deal, and so it probably runs on half the hardware it needs, and has no DR facilities.
8. It was probably slapped together by hundreds of 24 year old new graduate business analysts, hundreds of 30 year old PMs, and thousands of offshore resources of dubious quality. Look at pretty much any bespoke line of business web application you have to use for your job. Chances are you hate it and it has maddening bugs that make it hard to live with. Now take that same code quality and put it in front of Joe Average, and I'm not surprised people are complaining.
I honestly think they should have done this in-house with supplemental hired gun contractors for the areas they needed it in. Despite the stories, I'm sure working for a government agency has its advantages. I would think that people (myself included) would welcome a more stable employment environment (at the expense of salary,) a stable retirement system, and the ability to work on a critical system that affects people's daily lives. The problem is that people see IT people getting rich at Google/Facebook/Latest Social Media Startup and think that they're going to be the next one to make the big time. Reality is that most people are mediocre coders/IT people and they're never going to get a big payday supporting the current IT employment model we have.
Also, this entire mess would have been avoided by extending Medicare benefits to everyone. Doctors would be happy because they would get paid without questions from insurers, patients would be happy because they wouldn't have to deal with insurance companies -- the only people who wouldn't be happy are insurance companies, which is why we have the system we have now. Seriously, the Medicare system processes payments for doctors with very little difficulty -- because we have the insurance companies involved, we had to build a completely new system.
The linked article is subtitled "Medical Care Before the Welfare State, 1900-1930". In other words, medical care before even antibiotics had been developed. It was probably affordable in the 12th century too. What's your point?
But doesn't this just show that there are very many people against the bill as passed?
(And before I'm modded down for stating a personal opinion, I'm not saying that we shouldn't have healthcare reform. Quite the contrary. I'm saying that many people like me believe the ACA did little to help. And because the political atmosphere at the time was ignored, now the partisanship has been ignited like never before and we have little chance for real, good change to occur.)
Frankly, that's hogwash.
The "political atmosphere" at the time was created for the purpose of blocking this reform. It didn't "pre-date" the reform effort. The propaganda efforts kicked into high gear to "break" this Presidency--to undo the public's will by neutering a popular President so as to limit his ability to do the people's work. They started screaming he was a communist because a bill modeled largely on their own response to Hilarycare in the 90's had been proposed by a Democratic congress and administration,
And I recognize that "being against the ACA" isn't automatically a guarantee you're "against all reform," but the problem is that the brigade of dumbshits leading the charge against "Obamacare" have injected so many poisonous lies into the debate that they salted the earth for any chance of compromising on anything. They called this tyranny, and some of them called Obama "Hitler" over this: That's not the debate tactic of somebody looking to "compromise" on common ground, that's an opponent who wants to politically destroy you to prevent you from acting with a mandate the public gave you.
That may not be your personal point of view, but the wider "Anti-ACA" movement is not nearly as enlightened as you. And because the "antis" who went overboard have gone so insanely-far that they've made a compromise now into appear as if it were the same as caving to anti-government extremists. At this point there's no way he'll give in.
Who did what now?
That is just too bad for the admiistration. When over half the states declared that they were not going to implement their own exchange, and the federal government would have to do so, the federal government had two options: build the exchange sites for those states, or rescind Obamacare as being too burdensome for them to handle.
They chose the first option, and then completely botched the job. Don't blame people who didn't agree to play ball in a rigged game.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
If we had the open, transparent, and bipartisan (seats at the table for Republicans) process promised then things would have gone quite different.
Now who's being revisionist? We tried that: Every time the GOP was invited to participate they howled about death panels. Every time they were asked for an alternate plan they babbled incoherently about a "Free market system" without illuminating us as to how to implement such a thing in real life. I'm not sure how many opportunities they should have been extended.
It's easy to say they "should have been included," and, indeed, they should have been, but their non-involvement comes from their own choices, though. In effect they essentially eliminated themselves from the serious conversation by saying such radical and easily disproven nonsense, and are now whining about not being included even though they excluded themselves from the proceedings.
I count at least three, maybe four (depending on semantics) major pushes to get GOP support for this law. Two of them were the "Olympia Snowe-job" and the "Grassley Gambit," wherein the named senators entered (in bad faith) into talks about writing a healthcare reform law for the purpose of dragging out the proceedings even-longer-than-they'd-already-gone-on because they knew full-well they 1) Weren't going to vote for anything Obama supported and 2) They also knew the democrats were desperate to get even one Republican to sign-on and take part, and the democrats (somehow, despite being slapped in the face with evidence daily for months) still hadn't figured out that the GOP had no intention of "governing" by reforming healthcare, but every intention of "stymieing" Obama, whatever idea he brought to the table.
There was also the summit, where the GOP basically said "free-market, rah rah!" but didn't offer any plan. Hey, a free market is a lovely idea: How about some concrete suggestions on having it 1) Actually exist int he real world (i.e. "How to get there from here,") without 2) Taking us through a radical "shakeout" period where "the market" decides the best answer to the question "How much does life-saving treatment cost?" is "How much you got?" and 3) Do both #1 and #2 without locking out millions of poor people from access to care.
And, of course, the main evidence that suggests the GOP would have adamantly, vehemently opposed anything the President proposed is their own words, the day after the inauguration. They'd already decided on this course before there was an ACA--they already decided they would lock-step oppose anything the Obama administration tried to accomplish--short of him changing over to the GOP mid-term, anyway.
Who did what now?
You should talk to Doctors. They seem to have a quite different opinion of Medicare
You should also look at world-wide comparisons. Medicare and other public healthcare programs in the US account for more dollars per capita spent than all or almost all universal health-care systems in other countries, and deliver lousy results comparatively.
Canada--with our nominally single-tier, public, single-payer health care system--has longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality, and better outcomes by any number of other measures. Critics (sometimes justly) focus on input measures like wait-times, but at the end of the day what matters is that we are getting health care and getting good outcomes. We aren't even the best in the world--just middling-decent as these things go.
So the real question is not "why can't government launch a website" but "why can't the US Federal government, alone amongst all governments in all developed nations, provide a reasonable level of basic, universal health care at costs comparable to those in every other developed nation on Earth?"
This isn't a "government" problem. It is a uniquely American problem, and the solution does not lie in any general ideological fix, but in the detailed structure of the specifically American, particularly broken, Federal government.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Include the opposition? They just go Chicken Little over fake scandals like "Death Panels" and have sworn in blood to kill it at any cost, including shutting down the country.
Politics is an ugly game, and sometimes you have to fight fire with fire. It's unfortunate, but what do you expect from a bunch of (mostly) hairless apes?
Table-ized A.I.