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

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

#171

Post by spiffyman »

wikiburner wrote: post #98
spiffyman wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone's denying that this launch is a failure. It's clear as day. josefresco's point, though, seemed to be that this particular quote could easily have been politically motivated. None of the articles you link restate that 'single digits' claim. One of them even states the number could be upwards of 20M. Just saying: take the 'single digits' claim with a grain of salt. You don't need to buy every ridic…

Hey spiffyman, reasonable points, but it really looks to me like josefresco is implying that the launch is getting unduly harsh treatment in the media, but maybe I misread it. Also, regarding the 20 million figure, here's the quote: Seven percent of Americans report that somebody in their household has tried to sign up for insurance through the health care exchanges, according to an AP-GfK poll. While that's a small…

Fair enough, misread the 20M figure. josefresco's already responded re: the 'mainstream outlets' bit.

As for not releasing signup numbers, I can't say I blame them. It wouldn't surprise me if the actual purchase numbers are abysmally low. On the other hand, it's probably reasonable to think those numbers will go up before they have to meet their self-imposed monthly reporting deadline. So I'd guess they're just sitting tight so that they can show a curve in the right direction. I don't think that's particularly insidious.

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

#172

Post by abtinf »

mgkimsal wrote: post #107
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]

Are they not also a Canadian company? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CGI_Group Why we'd be committing to using non-US companies to develop US systems... I guess it must happen sometimes, but on something this ... public?

We should spend tax dollars in the most effective way possible. If we can save money buying a good from a foreign source, more precious tax dollars are available for other vital government services.

You would need to do a lot of handwaving to try to argue that spending more money on "american-made" goods, just so that we can feel better psychologically, is a better use of tax money than, say, cancer research.

I'm not even sure what "american-made" would mean in the context of software, which is produced on a global scale. I guess we would have to use Windows Server for the backend systems (and only those parts of it made in the US), instead of Linux, which has Finnish origins.

Of course, I'm not saying CGI has proven very cost effective.

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

#173

Post by ctdonath »

somebehemoth wrote: post #151
ctdonath wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Given that the title of the article that started this discussion is, "We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404". I'd say it is fair to point out that actual cost was ten times less than is claimed in the article. I agree that no-bid contracts are bad, but they certainly are not unprecedented. I guess I am just not getting the outrage other people seem to have here. Maybe because…

I guess I am just not getting the outrage other people seem to have here.

"Buy my product or I'll charge you $3000" provokes ire, as does a subsequent "oh BTW, the website key to buying my product sucks, but that won't persuade me to delay enforcing the $3000 even though I've given all my buddies such wavers."

Such gun-to-the-head tactics tends to elicit verbose nit-picking. Not hard to understand, even if you don't share the consternation.

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

#174

Post by ScottWhigham »

brown9-2 wrote: post #147
ScottWhigham wrote: post #85

This is what frustrates me about many of our non-USA HN'ers here: every time the state sponsored health care issue comes up, the non-USA folks can't wait to talk about how their country has it, or how it costs this little to get coverage for this or that problem in their country, and then they wonder why "you Americans" put up with the system you have currently in place (self-insured, no state plans - pre-Obamacare).…

If the argument though is "we can't have nice things because we screw it up", perhaps we need to look more at why America tends to screw these things up instead of taking away the lesson that we shouldn't try to have nice things.

The "why" is easy enough to figure out. The "problem" with a democracy (or rather America's in particular) is two-fold:

1) when you say "we need to look more at why", the answer is "Because you keep voting this or that yahoo into office and he/she is a career politician whose sole interest is in continuing to please the various lobbyists, PACs, and special interest groups that offer the most perks."

You can then say, "Okay, Scott - how do we solve that then?" I think the logical/easy answer is "Put term limits on Congress". Force the lobbyists/etc to make new relationships every four years. Take things out of the back room and make Congress be part of someone's CV, not their entire CV.

2) Those same "career politicians" are the ones who have sole vote on whether to reform any change in term limits. Term limits have been tried before but failed to get anywhere.[0]

Until you change something with the career politicians of this country, we can't have nice new things.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_limits_in_the_United_State...

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

#175

Post by iharris »

hga wrote: post #152
iharris wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that CGI was also responsible for the ill-fated long gun registry in Canada, which was recently canceled due (in part) to massive cost overruns [1] and inability to cope with large numbers of users. [1] http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Firearms_Registry#Cost...

As an US RKBA activist since the early '70s (sic), I watched it from a distance in horrified fascination, and the Wikipedia section you cite matches my memories, that while the IT component was nasty and much bigger than expected/hoped/etc., it wasn't what crushed the registry. The job, including most especially human processing effort, was just massively larger than anticipated and was therefore not even vaguely cov…

Yeah, this was a good lesson how not to manage a large IT project. They didn't really understand the requirements or anticipate the user load, but the cost estimates were WAY off - from an anticipated $2m annual net cost, the actual net cost ballooned to $66.4m for 2010-2011. To be fair, the federal government was also at fault here but this absolutely blows my mind.

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

#176

Post by acdha »

Osmium wrote: post #8
Tloewald wrote: post #7

> the factors that play into which companies receive government contracts, a process called “procurement,” are fundamentally broken This.

How would you fix it? I could imagine a competitive process, e.g. pay a number of different companies to start producing their solution in parallel. And then at the end of 3 months, pick the one(s) that looks the most promising and pay them to continue with it. It sounds wasteful, but I just don't see a better way, because people seem incapable of judging beforehand which companies are actually capable of providing o…

There are two things which need to change: the first is that the government needs to hire more technical staff – years of alleged cost-savings mean that most agencies cannot hire skilled staff and so they lack skilled internal advisors to help review contracts. You can do things like hire contractors to oversee the other contractors — and hope that they're going to actually speak rather wait for quid pro quo next time their companies’ respective situations are reversed. Fixing this requires a change in Congress because the trend since the 90s has been to “save” by hiring contractors instead of staff; since contractors generally cost more per hour, this is rarely a win except for very short-term contracts.

There's a cruel irony in the procurement process where most of the efforts aimed at reducing cost and risk actually increase both by limiting the number of choices and increasing the pain of switching: when everyone knows it'll take months or years to start over with a new vendor only the most egregious failures will be declared unacceptable. I'd tackle this by giving government managers both more discretion and responsibility: more freedom on how their budgets are spent but audit a percentage of expenses every year to review results and conflicts of interest.

The key part of this would be figuring out a good mechanism to reward savings so someone has an incentive to make long-term good decisions. In some cases that might be things like hiring a solid in-house development team to work on a core function of the agency; in others that might be realizing that a service satisfies the most important needs rather than paying to build a completely custom solution.

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

#177

Post by jljljl »

Reread the article, this is complete nonsense. The $634M number is 6 years of contracts, starting in 2008 (Obamacare was signed into law on March 23, 2010), which doesn't align with his claim that CGI Federal won the contract in 2011.

The solicitation number he uses to filter the USASpending.gov site is also tied to a larger PECOS contract, and not to Healthcare.gov like he claims.

We're being had guys. This is poor reporting at best, or deliberate obfuscation at worst.

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

#178

Post by hga »

swamp40 wrote: post #170
hga wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an US RKBA activist since the early '70s (sic), I watched it from a distance in horrified fascination, and the Wikipedia section you cite matches my memories, that while the IT component was nasty and much bigger than expected/hoped/etc., it wasn't what crushed the registry. The job, including most especially human processing effort, was just massively larger than anticipated and was therefore not even vaguely cov…

Honestly, you would think that a company that has experienced "massively larger than anticipated" once before would be a good choice for this project.

I guess it depends on the tradeoffs of reputational damage and making money. I gather the government told them "build a system that can handle 50,000 to 60,000 simultaneous users", which was "based partly on the all-time high of 30,000 simultaneous users for Medicare.gov" presumebly during the Plan D enrollment season (although per the article the theoretical max of healthcare.gov has not been disclosed: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/10/05/health-...).

Whatever the company thinks of the official goal, there's strict limits to how much extra they can spend to handle a much larger goal, vs. their getting paid on an emergency basis to bulk up the site....

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

#179

Post by driverdan »

jljljl wrote: post #177

Reread the article, this is complete nonsense. The $634M number is 6 years of contracts, starting in 2008 (Obamacare was signed into law on March 23, 2010), which doesn't align with his claim that CGI Federal won the contract in 2011. The solicitation number he uses to filter the USASpending.gov site is also tied to a larger PECOS contract, and not to Healthcare.gov like he claims. We're being had guys. This is poor…

Maybe he got the total wrong for healthcare.gov but $634M should be enough to build and run every government website in the US for more than a decade.

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

#180

Post by genericresponse »

walls wrote: post #154
3minus1 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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).

> There's a previous track record of success Where? Definitely not the Canadian Firearms Registry, or the sites listed previously.

Full Disclosure: I'm not certain who 3minus1 is, but I used to work on the project he/she works on.

There was content at Healthcare.gov prior to 10/1. The applications that delivered the content to the site had very similar function to the ACA application. Intaking consumer information and outputting potential insurance options. Also, gathering insurer data to do this. Not a full prototype, but damn close. I like how CGI Federal is taking it in the teeth when there are a number of contractors who worked on this. QSSI, Experian, Etc.

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