The Billion-Dollar Website

stoborrobots writes: The Government Accountability Office has investigated the cost blowouts associated with how the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) handled the Healthcare.gov project. It has released a 60-page report entitled Healthcare.gov: Ineffective Planning and Oversight Practices Underscore the Need for Improved Contract Management, with a 5 page summary. The key takeaway messages are:

• CMS undertook the development of Healthcare.gov and its related systems without effective planning or oversight practices...
• [The task] was a complex effort with compressed time frames. To be expedient, CMS issued task orders ... when key technical requirements were unknown...
• CMS identified major performance issues ... but took only limited steps to hold the contractor accountable.
• CMS awarded a new contract to another firm [and the new contract's cost has doubled] due to changes such as new requirements and other enhancements...

Comments

Technical People

[TechyImmigrant]

Non technical people are not competent to commission technical work from technical people.

If you (as a government or large company) don't have your own technical people on staff to oversee the process and comprehend or write the specs, you're doomed. The contractors know well how to milk a cash cow, simply by adhering to the specs written by people who don't understand how to write specs.

Re:Technical People

[BringsApples]

Dunno man, I feel what you're saying, and agree. However, a quick look at the site will prove that there's more than just milking a cash-cow going on here. If you check out this page for instance, you'll find that there isn't any information regarding anything at all, just a bunch of random Latin.

Google translate thinks it's English, but it's Latin. Here's what I found it to mean:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet pretty easy. Unfortunately, lots of orange gear, but every time a commercial truck.
Gets certain warm-up is a lot of life from which the film's style is. I'd now look at a wide range of law enforcement.
Residents drink
Currently, my, lump in the throat, it's the sauce.
To learn how Warren financing, but the emotional temperature, the element of surprise.
Tomorrow protein recipes. He was smart, maybe he was always in need of a lake in Japan.
No matter who or how inexpensive and easy-to-time only. In order that on Monday, but the laughter of a wide range of airline, travel agency employee is the ugly, and not before or it's just the likelihood of the company. In fact, it has been said it is in the interests of the quiver.
Unfortunately, the keyboard of the United States in the very soft impact.

So it looks like this page, a page that many would go to looking for advice on what to do since no doctors take medicaid now (Many are no longer accepting obamacare at all), is left blank (feeling that perhaps what's there is some default junk included with whatever web-hosting software they use). Seems like someone would have done something to fix this by now.

Re:Technical People

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately the way of the world is that technical people would be quickly shuffled out of the way by sales and marketing if they started to reduce revenue by telling a customer what they really wanted instead of what the spec says.

Disclaimer: I'm a software engineering contractor that works on contracts for the federal government.

A solid majority of the contractors (the grunts doing the work) I've worked for/with in my career want to get the job done and do it well. Sales/marketing has a say at contract award and for mods, but during the actual work we rarely, if ever, hear from them or take guidance from them. The people commissioning the work (the government) usually have no clue what they want and, if presented with multiple solutions of varying risk and value, they still have no idea how to make a decision. The most altruistic contractor still, at the end of the day, needs to know loosely what the success criteria are...the government half the time has vehement disagreement about that among themselves and never comes to a unified decision.

The GAO's report is exemplar of what I've experienced...the government has no clue what requirements are or should be, how to execute, how to manage a contract. My contracts have routinely consisted of us contractors drafting requirements and handing them over to the government, only to have them ask us if they were sufficient and would accomplish the (loosely defined) task, then sign them, hand them off to contracts and they appear on our desk weeks down the line modified by contracts to be 1) more generic, or 2) incorrect. The government oversight at the program manager level is almost entirely a rubber stamping process.

Re:Technical People

[Anonymous Coward]

sales & marketing (not entirely unfair, they are typically huge scumbags)

I'm a web developer who works in the marketing department of a large organization. The people in my department are smart professionals who are tasked with keeping the organization on-message and professional in its communications with the outside world. This is an immensely difficult herding-cats kind of job because so many different departments and individuals are communicating with the public every day, and many of them do so in a way that unnecessarily casts the organization in a negative light. Sometimes it's just a matter of professionalism (poor grammar/spelling, rudeness, childishness), and other times it's because they're uninformed and telling people things that simply aren't true, which ends up confusing everyone.

Our department has a broader and deeper understanding of this organization than anyone else here, including the top leadership. We're the ones who have to continuously remind everyone else of the organization's guiding principles and priorities. And every time someone sends out yet another bulk email to 20,000 people in pink Comic Sans containing information that was no longer accurate as of 2007, we're the ones who have to beg them, yet again, to run their communications by us before they send them out. In fact, how about we just start sending your materials out for you? We'd be happy to. No, really, it would be our pleasure.

Contrary to common opinion, that's what a lot of marketing jobs are really like. Maybe some marketing people are scumbags, but not the ones I work with.

Re:Technical People

[Dr. Evil]

Last place I work was run by millenial developers.

They told me "the code is the documentation".

I asked them "ok, what are the requirements?"

They gave me a blank stare.

"How can we write code until we know what we're trying to accomplish?"

"You want to write a 300 page Word doc that nobody's going to read?"

I was at a loss... "no, but a doodle on a napkin might be enough. I need *something*"

Possibly the most educational 6 months of my life. Didn't accomplish much, everything got thrown out for not fulfilling the non-existent requirements. Despite the maddness, the people were nice. It took a long time for me to really understand what was going on. In the end, I was glad to leave the gig. The company was made of three one-man developer shows who didn't understand that the stuff in the heads of three developers were separate and unrelated requirements documents for separate projects. It was impossible to contribute to any project without reading the mind of the developer.

They measured their own success in achiving goals after they were accomplished. Which meant that the stars shone, but contributors rarely had successes.

in other words

[ganjadude]

it was a giant clusterfuck like many people on both the left and right were claiming way before launch. the site was NOT ready for prime time (the back end still is not 100%) and it never should have been launched when it was.

also, water is wet

Re:in other words

[ganjadude]

congress tried to delay it before the government shutdown remember? obama would not budge, causing the government shutdown.

after the shutdown the site launched, and as expected obama changed his mind and delayed implementation anyway

so the reason for the shutdown was that the democrats did not want a delay and wouldnt budge. then when the site launches and makes them look bad, the implement the delay anyway... yet they still blame congress for the shutdown. and based on your comment it seems some americans are still dumb enough to believe it

Re:in other words

[Pascoea]

This whole argument revolves around Obamacare. You can argue its effectiveness till you are blue in the face and never get anywhere. You would be more successful arguing about religion or programming languages.

It boils down to one simple question that you have to get consensus on before you can move forward: Is healthcare a basic human right? I specifically left out words like "affordable" and "quality" because they dilute the conversation. It is simple, if I am sick am I entitled to get better? I would love to hear somebody answer "no" to that question, and offer a reasonable justification without using any terms related to affordability, money, insurance companies, or quality of care.

So, assuming you are all with me on the basic right to healthcare, we dive into the money part of it. Which is what all of the bitching is actually about. Everybody has the right to get well, who pays for it? The current solution is that everybody has to buy health "insurance". If you can't "afford" it the gov't will help you pay for it. This is where the current administration looses me. And since this is Slashdot, why not use a car analogy. The gov't assumes that at some point, everybody in the country is going to have to get from one place to another, so they make it mandatory that everybody must own a vehicle. If you can't afford a car, they will help you buy one. Some people will drive their car every day, some cars will sit in the garage all day every day. Yes, in theory, everybody will be able to get where they need to go when they need to go there. But what about all of the money wasted on the cars sitting around not being driven, where has that gone? You can bet the guys at GM, Ford, Toyota, et al. are happier than pigs in shit. They just broke every sales record they have ever set. That is my frustration with Obamacare, the gov't just handed truck fulls of money to the insurance companies (who have been continuously turning record profits.)

Re:in other words

[I'm New Around Here]

It boils down to one simple question that you have to get consensus on before you can move forward: Is healthcare a basic human right? I specifically left out words like "affordable" and "quality" because they dilute the conversation. It is simple, if I am sick am I entitled to get better? I would love to hear somebody answer "no" to that question, and offer a reasonable justification without using any terms related to affordability, money, insurance companies, or quality of care.

I'll answer "no" to that question, without using any of the gotcha phrases you are hoping for. I will do so with a thought experiment I entertain myself with when I'm bored. I use variations for different situations, so I'll make one for your 'right to healthcare' scenario.

If you have a small population of people, say 500, and the rest of humanity disappears, what 'rights' do they have? Does one person have the right to live in peace, without one of the other 499 attacking him/her? There is no such right in the natural world where lions attack zebras or hornets attack bears. Do people have that right? Personally I don't believe they do, because that right has to come from something outside of the group of people. Maybe something 'higher than' the people. Yes, religion is basically codified human rights. Without that system, I have no more rights than an antelope or humpback whale. Within that system, I may not have the same rights as others, but most religions cover the fundamental ones of survival. Coincidentally, I am not religious, but I am glad most people are.

So, what rights does a 1-in-500 person have? If they are members of the same US Midwest church (that was saved when the rest of humanity disappeared), they have the rights their religion stipulates. They have no 'Constitutional rights' because the whole government is gone, including enforcement of the Constitution. If they are 500 random people chosen from all the cultures of the world, they will have to decide for themselves what basic rights each person has. And I can guarantee there will not be agreement on even the basics, if they even understand each other enough to argue intelligently, rather than gesticulating and shoving each other.

But for the sake of your question, let's assume the people agree than they have the rights of: not being attacked, non-violent personal belief/religion, privacy, speech, self-defense, healthcare. How are these rights enforced? Most of them are enforced by not attacking someone. Let a person live in peace, let them pray, let them talk, and you've already covered the first four. The fifth is enforced by not punishing someone for fighting off another person who chose to ignore the first right listed.

So that leaves us with the final right the group chose to include. How is 'healthcare' enforced? If there are no doctors/nurses/healers/whatever in the group, they have a real quandary. They have to train someone on healthcare, so that person can then provide it. But how do they train someone in a field none of them know to begin with? They have to have some of the group work towards learning what they know their doctors knew. That's not going to go very well, and will take a long time doing it.

Now let's say that one of the 500 is a general practitioner, and has the knowledge needed to treat common conditions the group will face. What if he doesn't want to do so? If he decides he wants to be alone to contemplate his own beliefs for a while, in light of the disappearance of the rest of humanity, does the rest of the group have the right to force him to be their doctor? If he wants to move away, start a small farm to raise vegetables and forget all his medical knowledge, does the group have the right to force him to train someone as an apprentice/replacement? If he will agree to see some people but not others, for whatever reason, do the others have a right to force him to see them as well? Do they have the right to follow him around begging for his attention? Do they have the right t

F-35 Joint Strike Fighter

[tekrat]

Really, we want to complain about a website that cost a Billion? This is the United States Government, full of waste, fraud, no-bid contracts, and shit spread out out over every state so that ever senator and congressman has his slice of the taxpayer slush fund.

Witness the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, an aircraft nobody needs, trying to fill too many roles, and was supposed to save our armed services money by having one plane replace many planes.

Except it's billions over budget, still doesn't work (and might never work), and is expected to cost more than a Trillion dollars before all is said and done.

Meanwhile the aircraft is being usurped by drones, which are cheaper, easier to deploy, and may fill all the roles we'd ever need this crazy ass jet for. And we're trying so hard to make it stealthy, meanwhile as pointed out in a slashot article a few weeks back, long wave radar will find the plane just fine.

And yet the Pentagon continues to shovel more money into the project because -- guess what, there's no "plan B". This is the people we depend upon to strategize for us in times of war, and they have absolutley no fall-back plan. Brilliant.