HealthCare.gov: What Went Wrong?

New submitter codeusirae writes "An initial round of criticism focused on how many files the browser was being forced to download just to access the site, per an article at Reuters. A thread at Reddit appeared and was filled with analyses of the code. But closer looks by others have teased out deeper, more systematic issues."

Comments

They had 55 contractors. Duh.

[Ukab the Great]

It's hard enough to work with one spotty vendor, let alone 55. That number, 55, represents somewhere between 55 and 55-squared lines of possibly iffy communication between possibly iffy organizations. When I first heard that healthcare.gov had 55 contractors working on it, I was surprised that the damn thing ran at all.

Conspiracy-Theory-Fu

[theshowmecanuck]

Maybe it's the fault of libertarians that seem to make up a significant percentage of the tech demographic; wanting to kill the Affordable Healthcare Act. Or tea party programmers wanting the same thing who managed to get on the project. Come on man! Think of some more conspiracies!! Lovin' it.

Of course it couldn't be the incompetence of contracting companies that seem to make a living because they have or aim to have some sort of inside track in Washington rather than the chops to do the actual thing that needs doing. Of course that would never happen in Washington or any other political capital. I'm not saying the way the primary contractor, Quebec company CGI, does business in any way follows recent Quebec business practices. They are probably a well above board and good honest corporate citizen (although according to the Washington Post article above they did screw up another medical system based project). I'm just saying that if Quebec ever did separate from Canada, as it is now, they'd have to think up some other adjective to describe it. It's too cold to grow bananas there.

Frankly (and personally) though, I wouldn't trust any company to government contracts with stated aims published in their profiles like: "The ultimate aim is to establish relations so intimate with the client that decoupling becomes almost impossible," (see Washington Post article). Especially not from Quebec.

Re:On Further Examination

[garyebickford]

I recall a study from several years ago (10 years? possibly) that showed the probability of failure increased with the size (budget) of the project. Above about $5 million in then-dollars the probability was near 100%. As I recall failure was defined as either technical failure, or budget overruns going so high the project was cancelled. Of course, I have no citation. That would be too easy. :)

However, I did search for "Probability of Software Project Failure", and got some fascinating results. This is one of them: Statistics over IT projects failure rate - a summary review of several of the most definitive studies over the last 20 years. And this one: Healthcare.gov website 'didn't have a chance in hell' notes that:

The Standish Group, which has a database of some 50,000 development projects, looked at the outcomes of multimillion dollar development projects and ran the numbers for Computerworld.

Of 3,555 projects from 2003 to 2012 that had labor costs of at least $10 million, only 6.4% were successful. The Standish data showed that 52% of the large projects were "challenged," meaning they were over budget, behind schedule or didn't meet user expectations. The remaining 41.4% were failures -- they were either abandoned or started anew from scratch.

And I suppose this: £12bn NHS computer system is scrapped... and it's all YOUR money that Labour poured down the drain fits into this model pretty well. (Regardless of one's opinion about the Daily Mail.)

Re:bitch and moan

[J. J. Ramsey]

From Kevin Drum's blog:

Over the past three years, insurance companies have swapped their plans around so fast and so often that virtually no one today has a plan more than a couple of years old—something that seems an awful lot like a deliberate effort to evade Obamacare's original intent that most individual policies would be grandfathered and therefore remain available to existing customers who wanted to keep them. [Footnote: Plans in existence before March 23, 2010, are grandfathered, which makes them exempt from most of the new requirements of Obamacare. However, if your insurance company switched you into a "better" plan after that date, it's not grandfathered and can be canceled at any time.] Now, having engineered a situation where most current policies aren't grandfathered, millions of people are getting letters canceling their existing plans and being told that the replacement is far more expensive.

So basically, these insurance companies sending out these cancellation notices were gaming the system so that they could both undermine the law and blame it for "forcing" their customers to buy more expensive coverage.

Re:Here is a thought..

[ClickOnThis]

> You mean like Medicare (single-payer) or the VA (government-run?) Both have high satisfaction ratings.

You must be joking? The VA with high satisfaction ratings? And Medicare is an insurer of LAST RESORT, of course people are going to at least appreciate that aspect of it. It's that or NOTHING.

No, I am not joking:

http://www.defense.gov/News/NewsArticle.aspx?ID=14560
http://www.commonwealthfund.org/News/News-Releases/2009/May/Elderly-Medicare-Beneficiaries-Give-Their-Coverage-Higher-Ratings.aspx