Obama administration to end contract with company behind HealthCare.gov • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by dclowd9901 » Fri, Jan 10, 2014, 10:55 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #25

dclowd9901 wrote: post #19

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?

Lobbying exists and is legal. Corruption is ever-present and well-documented, from 3rd to 1st world countries. Contracts are widely regarded by private industry to be obscenely overpriced at best, and highway robbery at worst. Senators are regularly known to block necessary bills to write in pet projects that will benefit their campaigns/constituents directly, even at the detriment of everyone else. Want an example? Northrop Grummond is hardly a scrappy small company, but they lost out to Boeing, even though Boeing was going to create a worse, more expensive aircraft, because senators in South Carolina didn't want their state to lose the jobs.

If you are anything but cynical regarding the government contract bidding process, you're asking to be made a fool of.

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

#52

Post by smsm42 » Sat, Jan 11, 2014, 5:13 AM UTC

greg5green wrote: post #5

>>Accenture, which is one of the world’s largest consulting firms, has extensive experience with computer systems on the state level, and it built California’s new health insurance exchange. Hasn't California's exchange had big problems too?

California exchange site sucked big time at the start and still sucks, but I've heard stories of people I know that actually signed up there. So compared to healthcare.gov it works better. Compared to normal proper site it's a disaster (or at least was couple of months ago when I last checked) but I guess good enough for government work.

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

#53

Post by smsm42 » Sat, Jan 11, 2014, 5:22 AM UTC

patrickg_zill wrote: post #43

Am I the only one who thinks that the failures were intentional - that the whole mix-up is a passive-aggressive way of herding the USA into eventual single-payer? If Washington DC is, in fact, really that stupid and it is not intentional, under what strange notion of justice am I to pay taxes to these morons?

Depends on what you mean by intentional. I'm not sure if the guys that call the shots are Machiavellian enough for such things - given how incompetent they are in everything else, hard to imagine they would be super-competent in long-reaching plots. If they had been able to execute long-running plans of such magnitude with such certainty, they wouldn't screw up so many things so badly as they had.

However, the resulting vector of their efforts and failures may very well point into that direction, and not without their cooperation and help, since once they beat insurance industry into full dependency and make the population rely on subsidized care, the next logical step would be to eliminate the middlemen - there would be no point for them to exist anymore, at least not as independent entities - given that they would have no independence as such and serve no useful function in such setup.

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

#54

Post by MichaelApproved » Mon, Jan 13, 2014, 4:33 PM UTC

Iftheshoefits wrote: post #31

MichaelApproved wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The were able to clean up and improve an existing system, yes. That doesn't imply anything about their abilities to have created it from the ground up.

To me, it implies they have even more ability than if I saw them build it from the ground up. They were able to read the garbage written by the other developers and make something useful out of it. Pretty impressive!