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flybrand

Gov’t rollout of IT - just like any large roll out of IT - remains a mess. The recent work w FAFSA is a good example.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/03/11/how-new-...

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healthcare.gov turned out alright for the most part.

Negatives:

There is still an unavoidable 20 clicks to select your health insurance, there is no way to get some .csv output or even chart to compare plans. Everything is clicking clicking clicking.

Most people probably don't need to compare 200+ plans, but by not having the UX the insurance companies win.

Positives:

Everything is explained in understandable terms. I don't think its possible to mess things up.

I know billion dollar websites are prob a bad idea, but if we can create over a billion in savings/GDP growth, it should be a no-brainer to invest in stuff like this.

I'd rather see most of that billion invested in fixing the processes that led to a billion dollar website being a possibility.

Stop having the government use private contractors and instead employ critical infrastructure IT development inhouse.

It's not as if the government doesn't have experience employing software developers. When you introduce a private company into the mix you get a perverse incentive to jack up the price as much as said private company can get away with. And since uncle sam has an infinitely deep pocket book, you can imagine how easy delays and budget ballooning can be.

I'd much rather the government waste $1 million on 10 lazy devs that are hard to fire (because, government) then have them spend $1 billion dollars on garbage rushed work that probably cost the implementing contractors $30k to actually produce (So much of the initial work was simply outsourced) and who knows how much to go back and fix.

I've only used healthcare.gov once, and that was a couple years ago. It seemed to work quite well.

Then I took an unexpected job and had to pay all of it back, but that's another story. :-)

A billion dollar cart checkout flow.

HealthCare.gov is a decent large government big UX project. It turned out pretty good, all things considered.

IMO, I wish the government would have found and replicated (or contracted?) the service I had used before HealthCare.gov existed [0], and just bolted on the subsidies and other things they do. It is still functional today, and I've used it to get insurance since HealthCare.gov went live (specifically off-marketplace, but marketplace-compliant insurance), and it is my first stop anytime my HealthCare.gov insurance tells me the price is going up. I compare with eHealthInsurance, if eHealthInsurance is cheaper, I go with it instead.

0: https://www.ehealthinsurance.com/

A good reminder to read about how it almost didn't turn out alright.

* https://time.com/10228/obamas-trauma-team/

* https://www.pauladamsmith.com/blog/2023/10/the-10-year-anniv...

(And of course the related Hacker News threads.)

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7312442

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37957152

If you think healthcare.gov turned out alright, you're just proving the point.

I'd hate to see how "not-alright" projects ended up.

I guess they had to be scrapped after wasting billions of dollars?

I tried to renew my passport and it looks like they tried to get an online renewal system off the ground, got lift for a few months, then shut it down indefinitely. From the country that brought you the internet, here’s a broken web form. Then again the state dept is pretty anti common person; poor people wait for months to renew their passport while rich people just pay extra to expedite it.

The tax filing system is being launched to a limited number of people in a limited number of states specifically to avoid these issues. They’re essentially smaller pilot programs aimed at the more simple tax cases, where they can learn and build on top of that.

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