We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404 • Hacker News Board

Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

#131

Post by Raphael » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 2:31 PM UTC

nutate wrote: post #89

mark_l_watson wrote: post #53

I lost my group health plan, which I had for fifteen years, recently so I has experienced the web site first hand :-) My latest complaint: I logged in many times last week to fill in information, a bit at a time before I lost access. Then starting Sunday morning I could no longer login. On the phone last night I was told that they had wiped all stored passwords and to follow the "I don't remember my password" link. C…

To play devils advocate, have you tried logging into Aetna, Cigna, Blue Cross Blue Shield, etc recently? Just as fucked in terms of passwords being screwed, lockouts, other such nonsense.

No, but I've signed in to Facebook, Google, Reddit, etc. It's a solved problem.

Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

#132

Post by Raphael » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 2:31 PM UTC

nutate wrote: post #89

mark_l_watson wrote: post #53

I lost my group health plan, which I had for fifteen years, recently so I has experienced the web site first hand :-) My latest complaint: I logged in many times last week to fill in information, a bit at a time before I lost access. Then starting Sunday morning I could no longer login. On the phone last night I was told that they had wiped all stored passwords and to follow the "I don't remember my password" link. C…

To play devils advocate, have you tried logging into Aetna, Cigna, Blue Cross Blue Shield, etc recently? Just as fucked in terms of passwords being screwed, lockouts, other such nonsense.

No, but I've signed in to Facebook, Google, Reddit, etc. It's a solved problem.

Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

#133

Post by Raphael » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 2:31 PM UTC

nutate wrote: post #89

mark_l_watson wrote: post #53

I lost my group health plan, which I had for fifteen years, recently so I has experienced the web site first hand :-) My latest complaint: I logged in many times last week to fill in information, a bit at a time before I lost access. Then starting Sunday morning I could no longer login. On the phone last night I was told that they had wiped all stored passwords and to follow the "I don't remember my password" link. C…

To play devils advocate, have you tried logging into Aetna, Cigna, Blue Cross Blue Shield, etc recently? Just as fucked in terms of passwords being screwed, lockouts, other such nonsense.

No, but I've signed in to Facebook, Google, Reddit, etc. It's a solved problem.

Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

#134

Post by Raphael » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 2:31 PM UTC

nutate wrote: post #89

mark_l_watson wrote: post #53

I lost my group health plan, which I had for fifteen years, recently so I has experienced the web site first hand :-) My latest complaint: I logged in many times last week to fill in information, a bit at a time before I lost access. Then starting Sunday morning I could no longer login. On the phone last night I was told that they had wiped all stored passwords and to follow the "I don't remember my password" link. C…

To play devils advocate, have you tried logging into Aetna, Cigna, Blue Cross Blue Shield, etc recently? Just as fucked in terms of passwords being screwed, lockouts, other such nonsense.

No, but I've signed in to Facebook, Google, Reddit, etc. It's a solved problem.

Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

#135

Post by raldi » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 2:32 PM UTC

ktavera wrote: post #83

For all of you that didn't know, this project was never put out for bid with an RFP. It was sole-sourced to CGI Federal without any competitive bids. "Federal health officials have not yet explained why CGI was given the contract or why it was awarded on a sole-source basis." http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/some-say-h... [Edit to add source]

That's an interesting claim, but I can't bring myself to upvote it unless you add a citation link.

Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

#136

Post by 3minus1 » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 2:32 PM UTC

pkfrank wrote: post #122

3minus1 wrote: post #110

Hi, I actually work for CGI Federal on a closely related website to healthcare.gov. There's some inaccurate speculation going on in this thread that I want to correct. Employees at CGI Federal are not payed hourly. Also, a lot of people have mentioned cronyism, which I think is baseless. CGI Federal already had contracts for Medicare.gov and CMS.gov, so when CMS had to build healthcare.gov, CGI was an obvious choice.…

>Also, a lot of people have mentioned cronyism, which I think is baseless. CGI Federal already had contracts for Medicare.gov and CMS.gov, so when CMS had to build healthcare.gov, CGI was an obvious choice. You may be correct, but arguing that "because we generally get these contracts, we were an obvious choice" does little to defuse assertions of cronyism.

> "because we generally get these contracts, we were an obvious choice"

There are good reasons a government body might want to give a contract to someone they worked with before. There's a previous track record of success, and they know that the company already has expertise/solutions for their specialized requirements (i.e. section 508 compliance).

Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

#137

Post by vaughan » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 2:34 PM UTC

Should have got Harper Reed and the Obama campaign tech team to knock it up in Rails on AWS.

Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

#138

Post by rtkwe » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 2:35 PM UTC

mseebach wrote: post #60

d23 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, because you're going to get the highest quality from firms that want to do completely speculative work. That's why 99 designs has the best designs, right? If you know you're the best, you'll compete for free!

It's not speculative? If the work achieves the stated end-goal-metric ("A citizen of the state of South Tennechigan can purchase a health insurance plan subject to the given constraints.") the operator is awarded the revenue offered ("$150 per successfully sold health insurance plan"). Think of it as a feed-in tariff. If you successfully purchase, install and connect a solar panel, and the panel feeds power into the…

The problem comes in when you factor in the danger of ever changing political and project climates. In this case if the Republican party had been successful in revoking the ACA whatever work the contractors were doing was now completely wasted through no cause or fault of their own.

In your analogy it would be like you're successfully installing the panel and suddenly there's a massive tree completely shading the solar panels or the power company suddenly refusing to accept feed-in power from residential structures.

Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

#139

Post by ctdonath » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 2:35 PM UTC

Shivetya wrote: post #106

ctdonath wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upvote this. Heck, push it to all your favorite news outlets. There's no reason why one obscure company should get the contract without viable competitors.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/canadian-firm-hired-to-build-t... Based on that article, the OP is wrong, the six hundred million is across all contracts, the ACA site which most people are aghast at is just under 60 million of that.

Non-sequitur.

That others got other contracts is not relevant to the point that this contractor got this $60M contract without a bidding process when there was no reason to not solicit bids from others.

(As others note, seems it was a lot more than $60M.)

Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

#140

Post by lnanek2 » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 2:36 PM UTC

Haha, yeah, I spend hours across two days on those government health exchange sites (the US one and NY one) just trying to get a quote. Kept erroring out and forgetting my history and other problems.

Meanwhile Freelancer's Union site was great: http://freelancersunion.org/

I got a quote easily before I had to do any quizzes. The gov ones were not like that. There were a few documents that had to be emailed in for verification, but they took care of that promptly. There was one bug related to zip+4 not being supported and not being changeable after entering, but they answered the phone immediately and fixed it in a minute.