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Obama administration to end contract with company behind HealthCare.gov

washingtonpost.com

21–30 of 54 posts

Re: Obama administration to end contract with company behind HealthCare.gov

#21
post #2

Too many lies in this article to take more from this than the bare fact that CGI Federal will be replaced by Accenture (the latter of which is no prize from what I've heard). I.e. the government's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) were notoriously the "prime contractor" until the 3rd week of October (when replaced by contractor QSSI, also responsible for the "data hub"), and the attacks on the contract…

Accenture taking over is like replacing dumb & dumber with larry, moe and curly.

Re: Obama administration to end contract with company behind HealthCare.gov

#22
The government isn't exactly doing too well with any of its software projects. The IRS had problems during tax season and the FBI has cancelled and restarted multiple times. The Dept of Interior has been held in contempt of court for how bad their systems have been.

Re: Obama administration to end contract with company behind HealthCare.gov

#23
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The government could have easily paid 10% of what they did to a tech start-up And when it failed, the government would be criticized for hiring a start-up to do a job that was obviously so enormous that only a big established contractor could take it on. And rightfully so.

>And if it failed Fixed that for you.

Oh, this project would have failed anyway. A lot of the work is integration with backwards systems, in a political environment. Point me at the startup engineers that are interested in working on that.

Sure, a mythical online website built from scratch in Node.js with a Mongo backend can be out together by a bunch of college graduates, but without talking to a dozen other systems this site is not going to do much, and as soon as you take people out of the comfort zone of shiny toys we'll see how long the remain interested when you end up in SOAP and CORBA or are screen scraping mainframes. The people willing to tolerate this mess don't generally intersect with the startup crowd.

Re: Obama administration to end contract with company behind HealthCare.gov

#24
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The government could have easily paid 10% of what they did to a tech start-up And when it failed, the government would be criticized for hiring a start-up to do a job that was obviously so enormous that only a big established contractor could take it on. And rightfully so.

>And if it failed Fixed that for you.

[deleted]

Re: Obama administration to end contract with company behind HealthCare.gov

#25
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The requirements for working with the USGov are restrictive enough that only specific companies are capable of participating in the bidding process. The Democratic party itself and Obama's re-election are, by contrast, private organizations that are not limited by these rules. Basically, it seems like the government sourcing process has shrunk the pool of potential bidders too small to provide a properly competitive…

> Basically, it seems like the government sourcing process has shrunk the pool of potential bidders too small to provide a properly competitive marketplace for software for USGov customers. And don't think for a second that this is unintentional.

> And don't think for a second that this is unintentional.

Okay, what if I do?

Re: Obama administration to end contract with company behind HealthCare.gov

#26

What's sad is that it wasn't so long ago we were treated to breathless articles regarding the software that was used as part of the President's re-election campaign, which apparently was well-tested and well-engineered enough to actually do its job when the time came: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-t... It seems today's politicians are (at least in some cases) familiar with what it takes t…

Harper Reed (CTO of Obama for America, who can be credited for those articles you're referring to) and Clay Johnson (CEO of the Dept for Better Technology) wrote an op-ed addressing what they see as the root cause for this kind of failure: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/25/opinion/getting-to-the-bot...

Re: Obama administration to end contract with company behind HealthCare.gov

#27

What's sad is that it wasn't so long ago we were treated to breathless articles regarding the software that was used as part of the President's re-election campaign, which apparently was well-tested and well-engineered enough to actually do its job when the time came: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-t... It seems today's politicians are (at least in some cases) familiar with what it takes t…

Well, think this out a bit farther. Let's say the SNAFU coefficient of a piece of software is 5%. If you're using the software to manage your election campaign, you lose 5% of your digital premium (over traditional electioneering using posters and TV commercials and other one-size-fits-all mass communication media), most of whom will presumably vote for The Other Candidate - that's bad, but you can just as easily lose the same or larger with a careless remark (eg Mitt Romney's casual dismissal of 47% of the electorate as 'takers' at the last election which ended up alienating an awful lot of swing voters even though he was obviously pandering to his audience of wealthy donors at the time he said that).

But put that in the government, and you're potentially disenfranchising 5% of the citizenry which is not only politically foolish but quite likely illegal, given constitutional requirements about equal treatment and so forth. If you have to provide universal service of some kind, then your marginal costs go way up. Suppose 99% correctness were the acceptable standard, such that Social Security, Medicare, VA etc. could just ditch that 1% of claimants that caused the most administrative problems; the administrative savings would probably be far more than 1%, I'm guessing more like 10-15% because once the administrative burden of dealing with a given citizen rose above 1 or 2 standard deviations you could just dump them from the system and cut your losses.

Re: Obama administration to end contract with company behind HealthCare.gov

#28

No shit. This whole ordeal has been nothing short of a complete and utter fucking disaster. And how much did the government pay to have this work done [1]? This is procurement at its finest. The government could have easily paid 10% of what they did to a tech start-up who would have done a much better job utilising scalable technologies. [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/10/...

I rather think that depends on what technological expertise the the start-up brought to bear on the problem. I understand it's chic to think that Healtcare.gov is "just another website", especially among a certain crowd who think that all development is web development, and best done on a MacbookPro using RoR/node/ /Go + . It's a mistaken impression, though, because we aren't talking about some from-scratch system. W…

> Honestly I don't think there is any contractor who could have pulled this project off flawlessly

A few flaws could be excused but the site was a disaster.

> or even very much better than the group of misfits who did Healthcare.gov

In just a couple of months, the current contractor group was able to clean up most of the mess and improve the site dramatically. In just two months! Imagine what they could have pulled off if the group was put together earlier.

Re: Obama administration to end contract with company behind HealthCare.gov

#29
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically, it seems like the government sourcing process has shrunk the pool of potential bidders too small to provide a properly competitive marketplace for software for USGov customers. And don't think for a second that this is unintentional.

> And don't think for a second that this is unintentional. Okay, what if I do?

It was probably intended as something else, but it has probably become a way for discouraging competition through mechanisms like regulatory capture.

Re: Obama administration to end contract with company behind HealthCare.gov

#30
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The requirements for working with the USGov are restrictive enough that only specific companies are capable of participating in the bidding process. The Democratic party itself and Obama's re-election are, by contrast, private organizations that are not limited by these rules. Basically, it seems like the government sourcing process has shrunk the pool of potential bidders too small to provide a properly competitive…

> Basically, it seems like the government sourcing process has shrunk the pool of potential bidders too small to provide a properly competitive marketplace for software for USGov customers. And don't think for a second that this is unintentional.

The INTENT is to limit corruption. If they could give contracts to anybody they want, then they could reward donors.

I think it's actually achieved that goal. It comes at the expense of competence, however, as those with the best lawyers (not best developers) win contracts.

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