Healthcare.gov costs $840M to create

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JEDI

JEDI

Lifer
Sep 25, 2001
29,391
2,738
126
All the missteps on the rollout of the Healthcare.Gov website rang up a nice tab. Try $840 million. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversaw the error-plagued launch, “incurred significant cost increases, schedule slips, and delayed system functionality” because of poor oversight of the project, a report by the Government Accountability Office says. The added costs ran into the tens of millions of dollars, the report found.


I'm all for Obmamacare, but jesus h Christ... $840M just to to CREATE a website?!

I could have done it for $1M.

step 1) buy book 'how to create a website in 24hrs'
step 2) google about website encryption and security certificates


edit:
whoops.. link
http://newday.blogs.cnn.com/2014/07...your-new-day-thursday-july-31-2014/?hpt=hp_t2
 
Last edited:
F

fskimospy

Elite Member
Mar 10, 2006
88,217
55,753
136
While that website cost way way more than it should have, you definitely couldn't have made it for anywhere close to your quote. The hard stuff is in the back end and the scale, not making the page look pretty.
 
IndyColtsFan

IndyColtsFan

Lifer
Sep 22, 2007
33,655
688
126
JEDI said:
All the missteps on the rollout of the Healthcare.Gov website rang up a nice tab. Try $840 million. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversaw the error-plagued launch, “incurred significant cost increases, schedule slips, and delayed system functionality” because of poor oversight of the project, a report by the Government Accountability Office says. The added costs ran into the tens of millions of dollars, the report found.


I'm all for Obmamacare, but jesus h Christ... $840M just to to CREATE a website?!

I could have done it for $1M.

step 1) buy book 'how to create a website in 24hrs'
step 2) google about website encryption and security certificates
Click to expand...

From your "two-step plan," you clearly have no experience or knowledge about building scalable enterprise systems. You're ignoring the infrastructure and a host of other costs. Assuming the government bought the hardware to run the infrastructure (and I'm not sure if they did or not), you are probably looking at $1 million+ for that alone.

There is no way it should've cost $840 million, but $1 million isn't feasible either.
 
G

Genx87

Lifer
Apr 8, 2002
41,091
513
126
I'd say about 740 million more than it should have cost. The worst part is they were stealing open source code to run the site. So what exactly were they doing for 840 million besides jerking off? Somebody is sitting on a beach laughing their ass off to the bank.
 
Spungo

Spungo

Diamond Member
Jul 22, 2012
3,217
2
81
IndyColtsFan said:
From your "two-step plan," you clearly have no experience or knowledge about building scalable enterprise systems. You're ignoring the infrastructure and a host of other costs. Assuming the government bought the hardware to run the infrastructure (and I'm not sure if they did or not), you are probably looking at $1 million+ for that alone.

There is no way it should've cost $840 million, but $1 million isn't feasible either.
Click to expand...
Just ask google to host it. They'll host it for free as long as they're allowed to read everyone's medical records. We would get more targeted advertisements like "find an abortion doctor near Boise, Idaho today!"

Paying someone to learn programming is incredibly expensive. Here's O'Reilly's book on Perl, 1184 pages. store. If I pay someone $20/h to read this book, how much would it cost before someone has a very basic understanding of that language? Web development is much more than 1 language. There's HTML, there's CSS, there's Javascript, there's PHP, there's SQL. Once the site is built, it needs to be tested. People need to attempt to hack the system or destroy it somehow. Those bugs need to be fixed then tested again.

exploits_of_a_mom.png
 
waggy

waggy

No Lifer
Dec 14, 2000
68,143
10
81
yeah 840 million for a website..just fucking amazing. that was one of the huge problems with obamacare. nobody took charge of it and made sure the damn thing worked.
 
F

fskimospy

Elite Member
Mar 10, 2006
88,217
55,753
136
waggy said:
yeah 840 million for a website..just fucking amazing. that was one of the huge problems with obamacare. nobody took charge of it and made sure the damn thing worked.
Click to expand...

Actually, somebody did and it ended up exceeding expectations.

It sure was a fuckup at first though.
 
Brainonska511

Brainonska511

Lifer
Dec 10, 2005
29,505
15,027
136
Can you post some proof for that $840 million number?
-----
This article, which still points out lingering, and potentially catastrophic problems still remaining with the site says $209 million.
 
waggy

waggy

No Lifer
Dec 14, 2000
68,143
10
81
eskimospy said:
Actually, somebody did and it ended up exceeding expectations.

It sure was a fuckup at first though.
Click to expand...

sure after they fucked it up so bad that they spent a few hundred million dollars and it couldn't handle more then 40 people on it on the day it started.

then they figured they looked like idiots and hired people that knew what the fuck they were doing and took responsibility for it. they fixed (for cheaper then i expected too!) it and got it running.

something the people in charge should have done from the start. hire people that know what the fuck they are doing.
 
N

nehalem256

Lifer
Apr 13, 2012
15,669
8
0
eskimospy said:
While that website cost way way more than it should have, you definitely couldn't have made it for anywhere close to your quote. The hard stuff is in the back end and the scale, not making the page look pretty.
Click to expand...

You mean say 10,000 webservers at say $10,000 a pop?

Oh wait that only gets us to $100,000,000.
 
Zorba

Zorba

Lifer
Oct 22, 1999
15,613
11,256
136
This is the problem with government procurement. There are companies that have no idea how to do anything except win government contracts. Even though they screw up every contract they win, they still get them because they know how to win the contracts. I think this company fall into that category, as I think I remember reading they had no experience building a website like this.

Companies that do have a clue have no interesting in dealing with government procurement, so they don't even bid. I see this a lot of military parts procurement as well.
 
PliotronX

PliotronX

Diamond Member
Oct 17, 1999
8,883
107
106
Well, you know the old adage whatever the private sector can do, the government can do half as well at twice the cost. Perhaps that should be upped by a factor of 10.
 
Nebor

Nebor

Lifer
Jun 24, 2003
29,582
12
76
brycejones said:
How the frack do you "steal" open source code?!?
Click to expand...

Violate the license agreement wherein you promise to reupload any improvements or changes you make to the code back onto the internet and claiming the code as your own. Goldman Sachs has a pretty good reputation for doing this.
 
theeedude

theeedude

Lifer
Feb 5, 2006
35,787
6,198
126
Good to see the criticisms of exchange are now getting down to possible GPLv3 violations.
 
Attic

Attic

Diamond Member
Jan 9, 2010
4,282
2
76
Government is wasteful with taxpayer money.

News at ten.

Government is designed to be lobbied and control'd by outside forces. How else do you keep real power securely out of the hands of the public (who'd vote for wealth redistribution and create real change). Efficiency is not the implicit goal of government, theft of the taxpayer is while obscuring this setup. This game has been honed to ridiculous levels.

The 840milllion is of course noteworthy due to the magnitude, but in terms of where waste presents itself in government it has many many peers and many more destructive to the average american or american's family economic freedoms.
 
T

TerryMathews

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
11,464
2
0
senseamp said:
So sue the government. Why doesn't Boehner sue Obama to release Healthcare.gov code instead of whatever he's suing him for now?
Click to expand...
Unless suddenly Boehner is a programmer and wrote the code in question he doesn't have standing.

You obviously have no idea how open source or copyright works. Just stop.
 
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