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.
I wonder how the political climate might shift if the threat of a de facto 'Annonymous veto' became something that policy makers actually had to worry about. On the up shot, it might finally force law makers to gain a responsible level of internet literacy...
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2013/07/government-gives-cont...
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2013/07/obama-administration-...
> Access Denied > You don't have permission to access "http://nystateofhealth.ny.gov/" on this server.
Why would the top level of such a site have permissions at all?
I just signed up and had no problems.
I get a message saying my login credentials are incorrect. I hit the forgot password link and enter in my username. It finds my account and sends me a password reset email. I click on the link in the password reset email and it takes me back to healthcare.gov with an error message that my account can't be found, which obviously makes no sense because they just used my account to send me an email.
Live Chat has provided zero help, only stating that it's probably a performance issue and to try back later.
One odd thing is that the registration page says you a need a lower case and upper case character, a number and at least one symbol from a pre-defined set. To my knowledge, I didn't use an uppercase character, nor do I use one when do the password reset, which properly sends me an email. I feel like maybe the login portion is properly validating the username requirements, but the registration didn't which is what has left me in this mess.
Sorry, this site isn't worth $600 million.
It has a nice graphic that takes up two thirds of the page while giving no significant information.
What could possibly be wrong with that? That's what most modern landing pages are doing, after all.
https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/registra...
Seems like I can remember several very public commercial blow-ups.
Generally I have had nicer experience with most sites developed under Obama administration like wh.gov and such.
People are so outraged that they call up their senator and demand...what?
The only thing people will demand is that the website gets fixed ASAP, because they were looking for some affordable healthcare options.
Are you all offering to design and build it 6 months in PHP for $50k ?
"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]
[1] http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Firearms_Registry#Cost...
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?
Our nations do have a free trade agreement in place, which on the whole I would say has benefited both sides. Patriotism aside, 'buy American' policies do not help with these partnerships.
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.
Heck, push it to all your favorite news outlets. There's no reason why one obscure company should get the contract without viable competitors.
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.
</sarcasm>
It is hard to read/understand that spending breakdown, not sure what each 20-50 million dollar allotment is exactly for:
http://usaspending.gov/explore?tab=By+Prime+Awardee&fiscal_y...
Given how we can see the problem with this as developers, imagine what we don't understand about the 10 to 1 or even 100 to 1 overspending on the military and "defense" budget. Just imagine the TSA and "Homeland Security" waste.
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.
A lot of people are complaining about the cost, even at the $60M-$100M, but I haven't seen anyone explain what costs would be reasonable for something at this scale and with the security + privacy requirements it likely entails.
The total budget for all government websites isn't important (for starters they aren't paid for out of one bucket), it's just important that individually each one is managed competently.
And you know the requirements for the next ten years of computing technology how?
Well here you go - this is the perfect example to share with you as to why most Americans didn't/don't want "Obamacare". We, the voters, have no confidence that the current system+administration+Congress (or previous 10 of each!) could've created a system for "health insurance for all" that worked and was efficient. It's not anything against Obama - it's that we've seen administration after administration try to implement some big, sweeping group/plan for 20+ years and every one of them has turned into an inefficient holy hell of a mess. The most recent example of a major #$%&-up is Homeland Security (which I think is the last major agency created).
If the American public believed that the current government was capable of delivering state sponsored health care in an efficient way, every Democrat and Republican in this country would've voted for it. So don't think of "those who are against Obamacare" as anti-Obama, but rather anti-inefficiency (or anti-bigger government).
edit: Also, the projects I work on are Agile and I get to use other technologies besides .Net framework (e.g. node.js and backbone.js)
https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov
You can deploy it like any other Jekyll site. The code and content has changed since then but I imagine it still has the same static front facing architecture, much like the Obama campaign fundraising site, which famously raised $250M using Jekyll static pages: http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-millio...
So the number of raw visitors may not be the most relevant number, as many of them may have hit the front page and left, or never got around to the signup part. But what exactly was the technology in the back-end stack?
So if you get elected to "do something" about orphans, you'll create an organization to do something. The goal of this organization is political: appear to be making progress on the orphan problem. At the very least, do not appear in the news as an example of government waste.
The current website problem is a political failure -- it looks bad. But that's just a short term consideration. The long-term bet is that over the next decades, the ACA will bring great political benefit to the political party that supported it, no matter what other things it does.
So when we evaluate projects created by political organizations for political reasons, the success criteria is much different than commercial or non-profit projects. I don't think this is a failure. Maybe a bump in the road, but it's nothing that won't work itself out over the next year or so. (And be long forgotten)
Remember, a lot of government contractors made money building these sites. A lot of people had jobs. A lot of committees and functionaries are able to add this to their list of good they've done in the world. Not being able to actually use the site for a while is a small pittance compared to the real, measured benefit the sites have created. So far. If it drags on for a long time, the political math could switch around the other way, but I doubt it.
So what did they do? They left the problem to future generations to solve. And the result involved a lot of bloodshed.
In any system of government, there's always going to be a strong desire to kick problems down the road for somebody else to solve. I think the best we can hope for is some structures in place to minimize this, but you'll never get rid of it completely.
What we see now is just 250 years or so of this thinking, with the default solution of letting somebody else handle it growing more powerful with each passing year.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/10/08/230424...
that discusses the broader issue of United States federal government contracting for information technology services. Some reforms are suggested in that story that would help more competent startup companies compete against the established federal contractors that win most of the big contracts. The specialized skill that the incumbents bring to the contracting process is not specialized skill in data-processing or programming for federal agencies, but rather specialized skill in navigating the federal bureaucracy for bidding on federal contracts.
This article even links directly to some of the code, which A) looks fine? and B) is like “Yeah, the problem wasn’t with procurement regulations or clear requirements or public-private cronyism or managerial competence, it was that damn person who told the computer what to do and the computer didn’t do the right thing.”
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. Couldn't they have posted that as a huge banner message and let people know? I had four days of frustration trying to login.
Then, when I got the reset password link, and followed it, one of the profile verification questions they asked for resetting my password WAS A QUESTION THAT I HAD NOT BEEN ASKED so I had no way to answer it. I wrote down my profile questions so I am fairly sure of this. wTF
Just as fucked in terms of passwords being screwed, lockouts, other such nonsense.
http://usaspending.gov/explore?tab=By+Prime+Awardee&fiscal_y...
This shows the $634M headline number as the amount of contracts paid to CGI Federal over a ~6 year period. It is filtered based on solicitation number HHSM500200700015I.
A little googling returns the following page: https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=f1522d0...
"The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) intends to modify the PECOS contract to
support the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) requiremnts for the
Development, Maintenance and Enhancements of HITECH Registration, Attestation and Inquiry Functionalities.
This work is already on the contract, the modification will incorporate costs for the option years."
A few of the news sites linked below imply that the $634M covers the total number of Medicare and PECOS contracts awarded by HHS to CGI, and that the ACA website cost only $93M, which makes it seem cheap compared to the private sites listed in the Digital Trends article:
http://washingtonexaminer.com/canadian-firm-hired-to-build-t... http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/10/09/3-million-obamacare-w...
Before we all explode in outrage, are we sure that we are reading the details of this correctly?
They hire the lowest quality engineers (e.g. the cheapest), and then bill them outlandish $/hour to work for government agencies. The project plans are packed with useless stuff, and are designed to exceed initial estimations. They get paid by the hour...
2) Compliance with government regulations costs money. Lots of money. This results in a lot more overhead. It also results in a lot more time to get people up to speed, on site, and going. This is why government contractors keep winning bids - compliance costs are huge barriers to entry.
3) Systems you need to integrate with in government (especially legacy systems) can be a complete pain in the butt. It's more likely you're integrating with some FORTRAN green screen than a nice JSON API. This makes large scale systems integration hard.
That said...the app is still very broken and there is obviously a failure here. Failure to test properly (otherwise poorly written tests), failure to open to competitive bids judging from another comment in this thread, and many other issues.
There is a LOT to be done to improve IT acquisition in government, and many things should have gone right that went wrong for the money spent (Figures I saw were more like $138 Million in other publications), but readers should please consider the organizational barriers and difficulties that exist and then factor it into the cost. It doesn't take the sting away, but it does lessen it a bit.
If it's working now, which is seems to be, what's the problem? (OK, I'll concede that $634M is totally and completely insane. But I'm not convinced by the rest of the "bad code" complaints.)
I've just tried creating yet another count. It's hung up on 'step 3' ('please wait' - modal spinner, assuming it's emailing my email address). 3 minutes spinning so far.
OK - it just got done. Got an email. Clicked the link. Logged in. Pause... Taken to https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/auth/userprofile which is just a white screen.
So... still not working for at least some people.
Anyway, sorry it's not working for you, if you're really trying to get insurance.
To spend this kind of money on sites with these kinds of results is just disgraceful:
"The site is so busted that, as of a couple days ago, the number of people that successfully purchased healthcare through it was in the 'single digits,' according to the Washington Post."
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505269_162-57606633/obamacare-we...
“Very, very few people that we’re aware of have enrolled in the federal exchange,” said one insurance industry official, who like many in the industry, spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for possibly offending the Obama administration. “We are talking single digits.”
So one guy allegedly in the "insurance industry" who won't give his name has said enrollment has been in the single digits. Not overall enrollment mind you, just what this one guy has seen come across his desk.
But that's how this article has been spun. Millions of people! single digit success rate! as reported by "some guy". A sad state of affairs indeed.
Not even the administration's biggest defenders are trying to spin this as a successful launch.
Are you really implying the media as a whole is biased against Obama?
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505269_162-57606633/obamacare-we...
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/poll-rollout-health-exchanges...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/some-say-h...
This.
* hire really smart people with up-to-date views on technology [1] * build on, and release new open source [2]
[1] https://www.gov.uk/designprinciples [2] https://github.com/alphagov
I'm seeing a system that contains a complete list of government contractors/sub-contractors (this actually exists today). For each company, a list of verified skills (a proven track record) would allow a procurement agent to narrow the field, and a reputation system that let's the cream rise to the top.
I'm not sure it would be feasible to track the employees that make up a company as that's pretty fluid (on the time-scale of government contracts), but in the software field, you could (for instance) sum the reputation of the company's developers stack-overflow profiles.
Obviously, a lot more thought is required!
Also I am really looking forwards to the day I can't get my kid seen by a doctor because there was a budget fight and the government shut down.
ETA:
> And when things still go wrong, they simply throw “more money at the same people who caused the problem to fix the problem."
For that much money, I could be a terrible web developer.
I have a weird role: I work at a company which does tons of Federal contracts, but also has lots of private sector work. I keep my sanity by doing short term consulting with private clients. There are some sharp people working the Federal side, but it really is awful.
Winning a contract is EVERYTHING. It is a writing contest, and you can be sure that the Federal contract officer knows jack shit about the actual fundamentals of the project. The Contract Officer is a paper pusher whose job is to look at the line items in the Request for Proposal, and examine which company's proposal best "hits" each line item. And of course they will select a low bidder, which often is a bid too low for the company to even profit, simply meant to get their foot in the door.
The staffing of these Federal contracts is horrific. You get entire teams of "change management" people. I'm currently assisting on a personnel system for a major military organization. I recently had to witness an entire discussion by the change management team on removing hyphens from a particular term to help the branding. I almost threw up in my mouth.
The people I work with on the Fed contracts, in general, don't touch technology when they leave work. Therefore the only browser they use is IE8 (according to the customer org, it is more secure......) they do nothing outside of J2EE/.NET (usually just one of the two) and they HAVE/WILL never build a website that supports more than 5,000 enterprise users (concurrently).
It is incredibly easy to look like a wizard amongst this bunch, but the experience of the Federal world has made me avoid these projects like the plague. The incentives at the business level (and therefore the high salary jobs) are ALL for winning contracts. Performing well on the work won is just viewed as another cost center.
What are you referring to with "it"? The folks at your company who do federal IT work? Government IT employees? Federal IT consulting?
It's probably just a single contract with milestones that correspond to payments. Like "completed design" means they get 10%.
Its hard to win when you set the goals like this (low), too
We have affordable, universal health care because we've eliminated all forms of waste & corruption from our governments, and are left with a stream-lined, Indy 500 car pit type system.
I don't think so.
Get off it already - America doesn't have a decent health care system because insurance companies pay off corrupt congressmen to make sure you don't have one.
Saying that one of the causes of that is corruption is not exactly refuting the claim.
The vastly more efficient thing to do would be to expand our current socialist single-payer medical system (Medicare) to cover all. However, we live in a country where large financial interests our capable of preserving themselves, irrespective of the value they provide. The health insurance companies ensured that any solution to universal coverage included them, which is an automatically bad thing. They financed ad campaigns to scare the senior citizens into thinking that any expansion of Medicare would mean less care for them. Health insurance companies (in their current role of acting as payment middle men as opposed to a necessary role of covering catastrophic costs) provide no value. They interfere with the free market, and are less efficient than a Canadian style single payer/private provider model.
Anyone who thinks the current system is acceptable has never experienced the current system: they likely are covered by a large company's health insurance company, and haven't had to watch a family member try to buy themselves insurance.
Strange, a large number of us can remember buying individual "major medical" high deductible catastrophic coverage policies for quite reasonable sums of money, since they're true insurance ... policies which are now illegal. And a lot of self-insured people/families are finding their policies canceled or unaffordable, along with what they can in theory buy on the exchanges. Seeing as how Obamacare mandates 10? or so generally? new and expensive things, like coverage of your children till age 26. Or explicitly makes healthcare more expensive, like the 2.3% excise tax on medical devices: http://www.irs.gov/uac/Medical-Device-Excise-Tax:-Frequently...
As for "somebody's doctor taking orders from the government" ... well, what if they want to get reimbursed? Not quite the same thing, but just about the same effect.
As for Medicare ... well, seeing as how much it shifts costs to other customers, just how do you propose to pay for it as more and more people got moved to it? Being disabled, I'm on it, and track what my doctors get paid. Sometimes its reasonable, frequently its not, and I haven't needed anything really expensive yet....
And I do believe your race card has been maxed out: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-august-5-2010/race-car... ; why do you think we've opposed this since Truman made the first attempt? Was Clinton truly our "First Black President" as way too many said before Obama, back when Hillarycare crashed and burned?
I mean, the government is taking control of 1/6 of the nation's economy, why ever did the Obamacare enthusiasts think this would work even vaguely well???
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...
http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2011/09/20/medicare-is-more-ef...
sounds like this project is a colossal clusterf*k. Innovation and customer service are not in the government's wheelhouse, and I would certainly rather have market-based systems anywhere they work. It just hasn't worked for health care. And governments provide roads, schools, water etc. And the private sector has its share of disastrous projects, Webvan and Boo.com and Pets.com burning through hundreds of millions and going nowhere.
I sort of wish Google or Elon Musk or somebody would step up and volunteer to fix it, instead of saying, government sucks, people have to keep getting crappy/no health care.
Now Medicare shifts quite a bit of additional costs onto others, you need federal government approval for every new hospital bed, I remember reading some time ago that one state's hospitals were screwed because the state and the federal government had incompatible requirements for hot water temperature, etc. The FDA has massive and politicized control over many system inputs such as drugs and devices, the government has failed to intervene when almost every other country insisted companies sell drugs at near cost (our market supports way more than half the cost of new drug development), etc. etc. etc.
And just before Obamacare was passed the government (mostly Federal with states "partnering" Medicaid) was paying for almost half the nation's healthcare.
A market that was thoroughly intertwingled with governments doesn't really seem up to allowing statements like "It just hasn't worked for health care."
Saying that the new government healthcare system is inefficient and disappointing is not enough to malign it - it has to be equally or more inefficient and ineffective than the system it's replacing.
Just because option A sucks doesn't mean we should prefer option B which we justifiably expect will be (and is rapidly proving to be) much worse.
Oh, BTW: my nontrivial experience with the existing (mostly private) healthcare system is that it works very well, thank you very much, now please keep your hands & laws off it.
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.
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).
This is sort of like saying:
Also, a lot of people have mentioned nepotism, which I think is baseless. I've already done work for myuncleisgreat.com and myuncleiscool.com, so when my uncle had to build myunclerules.com, I was an obvious choice.
As for cronyism, who's to say you got those other site honestly?
Not saying you didn't, just that you're not citing any evidence. I can: I'm disabled and therefore on Medicare since 2007, and use medicare.gov to both handle Part D annual prescription plan selection and signup, and to check Part B claims. Aside from companies sometimes lying through their teeth about the costs for various drugs (well, it looks like that), I have no complaints besides the site being a little clunky. It gets the job done and has never shown any signs of buckling under load.
I'm not sure what hoops the tax processing sites have to go through, but people are at least as protective of that data as their medical records.
If there are already problems with how federal contracts are awarded, it is hard to imagine that wholesale deregulation is going to result in a more selective process. For example, blind removal of lowest-bidder requirements would make larger-scale corruption even easier.
There are legitimate complaints and federal contracting needs work, but what kind of work? Let's not underestimate how much worse we can make it. The money on the table is ample incentive for people to propose innocent-sounding reforms which really just open up the taps or redirect them to different parties rather than increasing efficiency.
Look at the track record of the company, and use that in factoring in contract awards. Companies that routinely go over budget and over time should be penalized by having a reduced chance of getting contracts in the first place. That's one thing that would help level the playing field a bit.
Of course, what would happen is those larger companies would create related spin-offs that are technically not related, and they'd have 'fresh' stats to compete with, and the cycle would start over again, probably.
Navigating Govermental Bureaucratic Morass as a Service
Their website is now apparently in open beta: https://rfpez.sba.gov/
> the text on the sign-up page, the front-end javascript validation on the sign-up page, and the text on the help page all have different requirements for valid usernames in the database!
It's always going to be hard to be agile on federal contracts - there're too many customers to really get a clear view from them.
But just as you can find a bug deep in the code, you can also go up the stack and ask how it got there: how were the specs for a valid username defined and published? Where were the tests—or at the very least, QA procedures—that should have encoded and verified those specs? Where were the managers that should have made sure those tests existed? Where were the manager's manager that should have delegated resources to the manager to get those tests written? Where was the manager's manager's manager who knew how to hire someone who would value quality control? Who was on the government procurement panel that did not adequately assess their contractor's ability to deliver quality?
It's titled "Crazzzzzzzy code..."
Or view StackOverflow on multiline text in JavaScript?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/805107/creating-multiline...
Security is almost the same. 'Must be secure!'. Unless they procure and schedule independent penetration testing and code audit (if they even get the code), the vendor is able to deliver insecure code with a horrible UI and still be 100% within the terms of the contract.
The reason government doesn't do more agile is because the politics of the stakeholders can get crazy, with the end result being constantly shifting goal posts and nothing delivered. So they require Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS - give us something that already works), and yet due to the requirements... there's always significant customization required. I wish someone in government understood this : P
I have noticed how shocked people are when they hear how much custom software really costs. I don't know what you do for a living, but here's an example:
A family member hears you make software, ask you if you can create a website for his business for a friendly fee. Sure, you think. After reviewing his requirements, and deducting 50% because he's your uncle and you like him and want his business to do well, you give him a quote: 3 months and $10,000. He nearly gets a heart attack. What had he expected then? Well, a copy of windows costs less than $100. How could it be more than that?
A friend of mine works at the Ministry of Justice, and told me recently he has the easiest job in the world, because even if he were to just sit at his desk and do nothing he'd be delivering a better service than the agencies that proceeded him, and saving the ministry huge amounts of money.
[1] http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/ [2] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/hundreds-of-government-we...
(for comparison, click through to the HMRC list of VAT rates - fairy enough, it has more information, but it's so messy in comparison)
Public Contest -> Manager creates company and submits project -> Manager chooses own company -> Manager quits INEM to 'work' at the new company. This is public knowledge but there isn't much we can do about it
> the ACA website cost only $93M
What more details do we need? There's much worse going on at the same time than that ridiculous number. But it is totally sufficient in on it's own to be outraged.
Can you provide a more reasonable, informed cost estimate?
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 on their promises.
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.
Something like these healthcare exchanges should have been put to the market in a from where the revenue is directly tied to the end goal: The successful purchase of health insurance by customers (or whatever is the case here, I'm not intimately familiar with the mechanics). Have providers bid on the full thing by revenue pr. successful transaction + an SLA that deducts an appropriate penalty if it isn't met.
Ideally, you don't even need to pick a winner, you can just say that any provider that successfully operates such a marketplace will get the revenue per transaction and let the market sort it out. End users will gravitate towards the sites that are fast and easy to use, "Consumer Reports" will test them etc. Lean, agile shops will win. Clunky, well-connected, but technically unsophisticated government contractors will fail.
I should note that the project I'm on did use this approach, but having picked winners it then proceeded to monkey with the teams constantly and generally screw everything up anyway.
Would we judge competing projects by kLOC? By percentage of code coverage? By extensibility of architecture? By percentage of GUI widgets already laid yout (even if just mocked up)? Or perhaps by conformance to an arbitrary test suite -- which raises the good old `Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?' problem?
Now the risk management is no longer being done by government, but by the banks who lend you the money. They specialise in such work. This a similar dynamic to film financing.
Imagine the secondary market that would pop up for the risk underlying such projects.
The new system acts as a facilitator for people to purchase insurance on an open "exchange" market. The government has as much to do with what happens afterwards as the NYSE has to do with how my 80 shares of Exxon perform. If the stock goes down, I can surely blame the Exxon board, or an oil spill.... but it certainly has nothing to do with the NYSE.
You should read about a law before you talk about it.
Then I can't even choose a plan I want since the goverment mandates levels of coverage.
Please take your blinders off your enabling your party to do horrible things.
The so called obamacare is mainly about access to healthcare. To the people that are left out. Also it is a Republican creation from the early 90s, when the people from the right were actually trying to devise policies rooted in reality with a chance to work.
What it does is actually increase the power of the free market by forcing everyone to trade their goods out in the open transparently.
There is no government control or rationing.
Do you not think that doctors would be one of the essential personal not effected by a shutdown?
And do you seriously believe the US would completely ban private medical care? We have the NHS (free health care for everyone) but we also still have privatised care which you can choose to pay for if you want. It's 2013 and the US still doesn't provide free health care for its citizens. Pigs will fly before they not only do that, but ban private care.
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....
You pay a dollar for an app, $40 for a Sims game, maybe a few hundred for an OS and office suite, maybe $1500 for a fancy laptop. Sure you can imagine a 'website' might cost a few thousand, but _tens_of_millions_ ?? Surely, that is a disgraceful waste, right there.
[0]http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-02/untangling-obamacar...
"effective" can be measured multiple ways. The more money that's spent on US companies keeps the money in circulation in this country longer than sending it directly to a Canadian company (even assuming they have some US-based contractors on the project).
More to the point, the project is primarily code development, which isn't substantially cheaper in Canada than here (again, not sure where the work was done, and by whom, explicitly). All things being somewhat equal, services money should by default be spent with US companies.
From what I understand, this was a no-bid contract, so how could CGI being "most effective" ever have been the case? Unless, of course, the overhead of a bid process was factored in to the equation; then, sole-sourcing can always come out ahead.
Where? Definitely not the Canadian Firearms Registry, or the sites listed previously.
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.
But that said, why should your demonstrated competence translate into success in a program at its launch? Medicare and Medicaid were both established in 1965, long long before the web.
On the other hand, did you have the contract for medicare.gov when the Part D prescription program was launched in 2006? Given all the interfaces with providers that sounds vaguely comparable to this site.
In a system that's structurally rather close to Original Formula Italian fascism, how "private" nominally non-government companies are when so much of what they can and cannot do is highly debatable, to the point where I think your quibble is very very minor.
This is a Heritage Foundation plan from the 1990's. The Heritage Foundation is THE conservative think-tank in DC. It is extremely right-wing in its nature, which is why Bob Dole was for it, and Mitt Romney implemented it in Massachussetts. The only think liberal about Obamacare is its name.
As for "my party" I'm not a Democrat, and have voted for numerous conservative candidates. I find the current crop's anti-intellectualism and hatred of science to be repellent, so not so much these days. The fact that you assume that someone is a Democrat because they are correcting your ignorance on a government program's details is telling of your own partisanship.
The government mandates levels of coverage with car insurance. It works out well.
The purpose of mandated levels of coverage is to make sure that short sighted people don't buy a crappy minimum level of insurance, and then when they get something serious have bills that aren't covered. These high, un-covered bills go unpaid and are forced onto the rest of us through higher provider prices.
Sorry that it will take you five minutes longer to buy "insurence". In the meantime I will appreciate not seeing every hospital waiting room being used as a clinic for the uninsured workers of this country.
a sick person looking for treatment is the opposite of everything that makes a market efficient, there's no perfect information, non-coercion etc.
if people want to say, I'd rather people be sick and die and have the freedom to not pay for universal insurance or get vaccinated, that's a values choice. but it's a serious error to say that the free market will result in optimal health outcomes.
I for one am willing to admit that I'm not smart enough to construct a path to a "free market" (a phrase I've never used in this discussion till this message) system after three quarters of a century of massive government intervention.
Heck, it would require an end to "democracy", and/or a few generations of radically changed public schooling, and/or "reeducation" camps for starters. Enough of the people want "socialism", and right now we're seeing the wisdom of Menken's "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.", after the Left has captured just about every institution that matters. The very idea of free market anything in the current environment is ludicrous.
Regarding what doctors get paid by Medicare, CMS.gov released those statistics. They are pre-negotiated with providers, and are prices which allow them to profitably operate. It absolutely doesn't shift costs to other customers for most procedures. The CMS.gov data shows this.
You are a beneficiary of a socialized medical system, and here you are railing against expanding care for others. If you hate socialized medicine so much, please get off of Medicare and go purchase private insurance. Put your money where your mouth is, instead of making the rest of us suffer a fate you are spared from. The idea that somebody who is receiving care from my tax dollars is arguing that members of my family who aren't insured shouldn't is infuriating.
As for what I'm a beneficiary of, since I started making serious money about when FICA taxes were massively raised in the early '80s (with the significant surplus going to the general budget, of course), based on my current health and genetics it will likely be at least three decades before I'm costing the system at net. Much longer than I expect the government to be able to keep all these balls in the air.
As for what I'm arguing for your uninsured family members, it's that Obamacare is not a solution (e.g. more likely to be access to a waiting line than healthcare), not that they shouldn't get insurance. The latter is pure hateful strawman fantasy, but I suppose par for the course of someone who suggests my opposition to Obamacare is born of racism.
I never said you were racist. Not all Republicans are racists, just like not all Democrats are hippies. But all racists are Republicans, and all hippies are Democrats.
My family is better off with access to a waiting line than nothing at all. But you wouldn't know that.
BTW, every geezer on Medicare thinks they're entitled to it, just like every farmer getting a farm subsidy thinks he's entitled to it. There isn't a single person getting an entitlement check that doesn't rationalize some way they paid in more than they'll ever take out. Join the club.
Please enjoy your Fox news. It is after all the preferred news source of Medicare recipients who think that its only Socialism if people other than themselves get it.
Here is an article you posted in 2010 predicting economic doom in 2011 courtesy of Obama: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870411350457526...
You were wrong then, and you are wrong now.
Just saying: take the 'single digits' claim with a grain of salt. You don't need to buy every ridiculous claim about this to acknowledge that this is a bad launch.
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 percentage, it could represent more than 20 million people.
As many as 20 million "tried to" sign up, based on their extrapolation of some polling data.
The last I heard, no media outlet has been able to find a single successful sign up to interview, and they are definitely looking for one.
The CBS video also claims there have been only "a handful" of sign ups, and it's getting reported in lots of other places. It could be inaccurate, but these are mainstream outlets reporting this, not Breitbart or Drudge. The administration is refusing to release sign up numbers, which certainly doesn't look good.
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.
The quote refers to "single digits" and it is ridiculous. If even close to 20 million people tried to sign up then that means many millions of citizens need this coverage and will likely end up getting it because having health insurance is critical to their livelihood. Am I to believe 20 million people needed health insurance, got an error on the web site and just said, "forget this, being uninsured is better than dealing with a web site!"?
"The last I heard, no media outlet has been able to find a single successful sign up to interview, and they are definitely looking for one."
This is a weak argument. It is an anecdote of an anecdote which even if true would not be persuasive. Are you seriously saying that no one has signed up despite 20 million people trying (or single digits)? Your evidence is that you personally haven't found a media outlet that have themselves managed to find someone to interview? Perhaps we should wait a few weeks to make judgement after the facts are known and the government is actually running again?
This. A Washington Post reporter talks to one random (and anonymous) insurance guy (with who knows what kind of political baggage) who gives them a single quote. They run with it, other news organizations re-run it (repeat x100) assuming it's fact because the Washington Post is a "mainstream" outlet right? And them whammo you have a whole group of people thinking that under 10 people were able to signup for health care. Even if they don't literally think this, the PR damage is done. The perception is now cemented that the launch is a failure because of a "Washington Post report" (sounds official doesn't it?)
Just because a news organization is "mainstream" does not mean it does not carry with it a truckload of bias (see FoxNews/MSNBC).
When I see an article like this the first thing I do is click to see the "source". Often times it's another news org/blog article who cites another "source". Down the rabbit hole I go until I find the actual source which often times has had it's content mutated and taken out of context and/or spun to further the original author's point.
This isn't a "bloggers aren't journalists" rant. I don't care if you're a tiny no-name blogger or work for the Washington Post; your sources better be solid.
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 grid, you're paid. If not, because you screw up any of these steps, you don't get paid. If you make a substandard installation (say, in the shadow or on a north-facing roof), you get paid less. The only thing that matters is the desired end goal: solar power is fed into the grid. You carry the risk, you get paid for the result.
The idea is that (at least in these cases) it's much, much easier to describe and document a desired outcome than to accurately describe and anticipate all the variables that potentially affects the outcome.
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.
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.)
"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.
[1] http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/10/09/3-million-obamacare-w...
Even if there were several orders of magnitude more signups then are being reported, the numbers would still be a disaster, so I'm genuinely not sure what your point is.
If the risk is large enough that nobody takes it, then the procurement office can look at sweetening the deal (perhaps by increasing the payment per transaction, perhaps by offering some compensation for good faith effort if the legislation is revoked).
There is enormous overhead in bidding on and winning a government project. They're the reason the "37signals" of the world isn't doing them even even though they could probably execute much better on them.
Regarding your second point, it's become somewhat of a meme in the press that no reporter has been able to verify or interview a single Obamacare sign up. That's what I'm referring to - not that I myself haven't by chance come across such an interview.
My second point stands. Your experience of the media coverage, while valid, doesn't necessarily represent fact. You have to admit it is possible that a reporter managed to interview someone who signed up and you and your news sources were unaware. Even if you proved this point to be true what does it say? No one has signed up? People don't want to be interviewed? Obamacare will fail? I don't get it.
"The fee in 2014 is 1% of your yearly income or $95 per person for the year, whichever is higher. The fee increases every year. In 2016 it is 2.5% of income or $695 per person, whichever is higher." - from https://www.healthcare.gov/what-if-someone-doesnt-have-healt...
Someone making $300,000 per year might pay $3k in 2014. I'm failing to have empathy for this kind of person who refuses to have health insurance. Poorer people pay way less of a penalty and are entitled to subsidies that make refusal of coverage much less fiscally logical.
The outrage still makes little sense to me unless you ignore many relevant facts.
And it's not that a person doesn't have health insurance (though some truly don't need it, being sufficiently wealthy), it's that one is penalized for not having a particular kind of health insurance. Some of us are quite content to pay our way cash, insuring only for catastrophic events...but, for some reason, our legislators deem that punishable, requiring us to sign up for undesirable services at outrageous costs via a grossly dysfunctional website.
This nation was created in opposition to such taxation & penalties, hence a lot of citizens stressing out despite "it's just a little fine, so pay & be done with it." A government which threatens[1] severe consequences for non-compliance with "trivial" regulations should not be surprised by severe pushback from those not inclined to comply.
[1] - for all the "we won't garnish your wages etc." verbiage on the website in question, I'm not seeing any legal basis for anything other than IRS-standard severe consequences for non-payment of penalties.
Since we've collectively made the choice to not turn away people who show up to the emergency room, here we are. I'd be all for axing the individual mandate if we decided to shut people out of the emergency room.
On balance, it seems far more humane to go with the individual mandate and penalties than it does to let poor people die on hospital door steps. Although it is possible that after people realize a ignominious death awaits them if they don't buy health insurance, maybe everyone will be scared into buying it.
Little else to add, except that we might remember how the drafters of the 16th Amendment, which authorized the Federal income tax, decided not to cap it at 10%, fearing that would be a ceiling soon reached.
Been there, done that. Never again.
Federal government consulting firms hire warm bodies at the lowest price possible. They are the people who employ the college students from Java shops (because a degree is a must, of course) who barely learn Java and then grow up to never touch another programming language in their life. Knowing anything from MS or Oracle is double plus good for your resume. You're totally replaceable to them and treated accordingly. Anyone competent or specialized is generally hired as a subcontractor to the main contractor and not by the government itself.
Government IT employees are nigh-unfireable and they know it. They're about 50% people who've transferred in from other Government positions because they know it's easy or they're former contractors who join the government so they have a stable job. The government managers who vet your deliverables and the upper managers who make contract decisions, well, they're just the previous technically incompetent people who've stuck around long enough to get promoted up.
As the individual contractor, contracts are usually 1-3 years so you're constantly always up for being laid off or moved to a different contract. Your company is notoriously stingy, but that's mostly because they're not paying you for competitive skills, they're paying you because butts-in-seats means they get their lucrative contract rate that's at least 4x more than they're paying you. Since only behemoths of companies can even afford to try to land federal contracts, your employer has a large amount of corporate bureaucracy you have to deal with and that sucks... then you're sent to a government facility to work, where you get to deal with government bureaucracy on top of your internal crap too. As a contractor, between both organizations you'll get to take hours upon hours of totally useless 'computer safety, ethics and public responsibility trainings' which are mostly written so 4 year olds can understand them.
The government technology you work with is generally 5-10 years behind the curve if they even pretend to maintain something. As late as 2010 I was working on a J2EE app trying to migrate it to Java 5. It was stored in Visual Source Safe 6, and their development shop was totally crippled by what was essentially "God objects" and file locking. Too many developers, too many chokepoints in code. I've spent more than 1 day of my life walking around a building asking if people really needed a certain file locked. Oh, and many government employees worked 9-40 compressed schedules and are out on Mondays or Fridays, so you'd better not need to write to a file except on Tues-Thursdays, even if it is critical to meeting a deliverable deadline.
While holding a technical discussion about current tasking with a coworker in a "hallway meeting" our boss's boss and the gov-manager-who-signed-the-contract walked by. I was later reprimanded for chit chatting too much instead of working.
Another issue, due to some contract specifics and my life situation I was able to decline healthcare coverage from my employer and I received that in salary compensation instead (had coverage through my wife). I was up for a raise/promotion due to 'time served' but that title meant they needed me on a different project/contract, so the healthcare compensation the government was paying my employer changed and trickle down effect meant I didn't get that anymore. I got a $10k/year 'raise' but lost my [substantial] healthcare compensation. I lost money per paycheck by getting a promotion. When I showed my boss he was like "oh, sorry about that but we can't do anything about it", I turned in my two weeks notice on the spot, thus concluding my life as a government contractor.
We had a government employee who was responsible for building our mess of a Java project (it was done by hand). It was error prone due to some self-referential build requirements, and the deployment of projects had to be done in a specific order. Generally a deploy took a couple tries.
While I was there I skunkworks-implemented Jenkins CI (nee Hudson at the time) to deflect constantly getting blamed for broken builds and down time when they occurred. The side effect of CI was that I had automated away this government employee's entire job and reason for being paid. One day that employee was out but we still needed to deploy, so in my naive excitement was like I've got it guys, watch this, pointed the deploy target at our live acceptance testing server, clicked the build button and ta-da, gov. employee wasn't needed and nothing was screwed up. Even better, it was completely deployed in a few minutes instead of several hours.
What do you think the result was?
The CI server VM got turned off.
Dive in and help change things. This is a monumental challenge that requires more people that know a better way and are willing to act.
"There are some sharp people working the Federal side, but it really is awful."
The "it" section is after the comma and not part of its own sentence. Maybe you could (I wouldn't) make that inference if it read:
"There are some sharp people working the Federal side. But it really is awful."
One of the engagements I get called to once a week involves dealing with some gov employees. It had the odd property of continuing when the shutdown hit, so its the contractors and no gov people. Productivity on the project is completely unaffected. Half of the workforce gone, no change in productivity. There are certainly less meetings, so that's nice.
Just to not be a totally cynical asshole, I have heard NOAA is actually pretty modernized and efficient and everyone I've talked to seemed to be happy working there.
I'd also add that while the place I was at had its share of crap, the government for the most part loved our work because their previous contracting company had came in, wrote up a ton of requirements and specifications, sat around for two years and delivered nothing functional (and still got paid).