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Comment by jnovek | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately the cost of healthcare.gov has become politicized, but it was extremely, absurdly expensive. Wikipedia says the total cost actually landed somewhere between 1.7b and 2.1b.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov

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I worked in the "rescue team" for a couple of years and the politics was one of the reasons I left, you never knew when the supreme court would stick their nose in and you'd be out of a job. I used to describe that job as having 100 bosses, 55 of those bosses wanted you to do your job for the least amount of money as possible and the other 45 wanted you to fail.

and also the terror that you might get hauled into congress to testify

I actually used to use that line with I'd talk to some of our vendors support people. They'd start dragging that feet, wanting to get rid of me and I'd say, "you do know what project this is right...." and then I'd say if we can't fix this really quickly it will be on the news and your company will get dragged into it and nobody wants to testify to congress that the market place site was down because of a bug in your equipment. It was pretty amazing how people went above and beyond when you put things in the right perspective.

The crazy thing is that a small team of around 10 really good engineers could probably have put together a robust reliable working Healthcare.gov-like system that could handle the potential 300 million users in 1-2 years. If you paid all 10 of them them $300k each a year, for 2 years, that's 10 * 300 * 2 = $6 million. Worst case, Healthcare.gov should have cost 5 times that, $30 million. I feel like the sort of egregious and copious waste in government should borderline be illegal.

The craziest part of it is that the 840 million isn't fraud. The contractor didn't pocket that. They actually spent that much money on legitimate development work. And if they had just delivered a working app, nobody would have ever asked any questions.

In a similar story, USCIS spent $3.1 billion on trying to build a web app to submit forms: https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2017/02/15/billion-dol...

And they failed at that too. Apparently what would have been a weekend project for a high school student was so hard for a federal agency that they burned $3.1 billion trying to do it. (This level of incompetence is truly despicable.)

I wonder if there is something pathologically wrong with government and how government (at least in the U.S.) does spending.

And I hear people seriously suggest that the government can't get things done because they are "underfunded"!

Having worked on the customer-side on large IT projects, some of these large contractors establish policies and development methods that are guaranteed to produce problems. They also hire incompetent and cheap labor, which causes more work.

Why shouldn't it be politicized? It's absolutely fair game to attack the other side for inefficiency and waste. Wish we had more of that than the usual back and forth conspiracy theories.

No, that’s totally reasonable. I was and still am a supporter of the ACA and I think the price tag for this site was bonkers.

I just think it’s a shame that it’s politicized because we can’t easily discuss it as a case study without pre-existing political opinions creeping in. It would be neat if this particular series of events could be dissected in a vacuum. Government projects go sideways all the time but there’s a lot of transparency into why this one did because of the unique circumstances of its resolution.

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