"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...
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....
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.
"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.
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.
[1] http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/10/09/3-million-obamacare-w...
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.
"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.
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.
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.
</sarcasm>