Healthcare.gov has disappeared from CMSGov's GitHub account
github.com
github.com
I was wondering why the issue complaining about this didn't have any recent updates.
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EDIT: It looks like some people may have used the Issues system to launch asinine political bromides against Obamacare proper - that were and are completely impertinent to the GitHub project. This could have been part of the reasoning for closing off the repo, but I've never dealt with users basically defacing my Issues system, so I don't know what your options are as repo owner in a situation like that.
I honestly don't care one iota about the concept of being entitled to the FOSS source code; I'm just slightly miffed about the seeming lack of thanks for the people who chipped in. If you will, it's about what's owed to contributors, not tax-payers.
It's a small thing that means a great deal.
Whatever the reasoning, kmfrk's comment rings true: wasn't this all about transparency?
Seems a fair reason to turn off the issues, at least for the time being. However, it is interesting that a similar abuse of issues [1] is left undisturbed by administrators of the WhiteHouse account when the asinine political bromides are favorable to the current administration.
I don't expect anything less, of course.
I do not.
I agree with you that disabling the issues due to abuse makes sense.
commit 56ef8da2e73712ddabc5f2f2907e62faa4e0e68e
Author: Andrew Newhouse <andrewwn@gmail.com>
Date: Wed Jul 3 14:02:11 2013 -0400
Initial Commit
Since this is public domain software, I will put a copy of the git repo on Archive.org when I get a free hour.
It says I have to "Review my application details" before I can go further, and sends me to:
https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/auth/OH/en_US/myAccount?appId=%=applicationId%%3E#applications
It has some issues with hardcoded redirects coming back from their API calls, but it's a start.
I originally made it just to simply demonstrate how a few small changes could make a large performance difference, but I've kept it up due to encouragement from some friends and hopes that somebody inside the project will use some of the code or make changes based on it.
It's way below the quality you'd expect from a modern front-end. Poor standards, undocumented code, monolithic sources, hard-coded data all around. Despite using Backbone and other modern frameworks, it looks like something a novice JS developer would concoct, not a project in the millions...
My favorite part so far (https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace/blob/mas...):
//got this from the internets
//fetchs the URL parameters
function getUrlVars()
{
...My hope is to reorganize it into a sane set of Backbone views & rich models so it makes a lot more sense. There seems to be a lot of dead code so pruning that is the first priority. Every function is in the global scope so it's actually somewhat easy to detect what is used and what is not... not that I'd ever advocate throwing everything in the global scope.
I agree that it is much less than you'd think that amount of money would buy. I hope that by bringing attention to it, I can make it clear to taxpayers and government decision-makers that we are not getting anything close to what we are paying for. The system for winning government contracts needs to be completely revamped, at least for the technical sector. I would love to see a competition-style bidding process, where a detailed set of specs are presented and all submissions that meet the spec are paid, and the winning submission is paid more. $92M buys you a lot of runway. I think we could have seen some much better code out of this if small businesses & independent groups were allowed to tackle it.
DevelopmentSeed (the guys behind MapBox) designed & developed a frontend site and then handed it over to HHS. That's where the good stuff comes from. Clearly however, whoever received the project from that point onwards doesn't understand things like asset minification or packaging.
My completely random conjecture is that whoever inherited DevelopmentSeed's code does not know how this stuff should work.
Also see: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2013/10/pro...
The front-end people did an okay job.
The back-end people is the Canadian company that has messed up.
It's the kind of company that is years behind on programming practices and over-charges in the millions because their clients never have any clue of the difference between good/bad software.
They tend to target markets that have almost no real software servicing it so there is nothing to compare it to (eg. commercial insurance).
This has been a theme. Unfortunately, I expect it to continue.
Government procurement is an incredibly coreographed ritual with a minefield of rules and regulations designed to make the process as human-proof as possible. Unless there was conclusive evidence about CGI's lack of clues, the process would continue with them.
I am not especially patriotic, though I also don't really think patriotism is a bad thing. Nevertheless, learning that the contract was awarded to a Canadian firm makes me reel. I mean no slight to Canadians, but if we are going to overspend by 100x, let's at least send the money to our cronies in the United States! Just for appearances.
No, that's right wing spin. We spent $94M on this thing. Still absurd, but don't be misled by the spin campaign.
Also your math is off. A $10M price tag wouldn't be totally ridiculous. Consider the cost of a team of 50, including QA, design, product guys, engineers, management, lawyers, analysts, data entry, etc for a year. Add 30% to cover risk.
So, it's somewhere in the 10x too expensive region.
$94M for a website is absurd, and reeks of incompetence and bureaucracy.
$650M for a website would be downright fraudulent. It's not a coincidence that it's the latter number that's being talked about.
Your attempt to silence debate by shaming those you disagree with has been noted.
In any event, I still think that's 100x the actual value of the web site work. The site strikes me as the kind of thing a decent consulting company could execute for just shy of $1M.
My point earlier, though, still stands. It's surprising to me that the "best" firm at navigating our regulatory maze is Canadian. A credit to them, I suppose.
But you should note, the STATE run systems, are not built by the same canadian company.
Only the states that decided they weren't going to run their own exchanges and refuse federal funds to help people who need healthcare caused the federal system to be created.
Apparently New York and California developed pretty good enrollment systems of their own.
The federal system was only supposed to be a fallback, but it because a primary because of mostly right-wing run states.
The whole thing is so politicized I'm not surprised that truth and reality are the first to go. I wish HN could be the font of reason in a sea of moronity.
Now that the show has turned ugly - why not just cancel the show?
> Correction: We miscalculated the expenditures related to the healthcare exchanges established under the Affordable Care Act, and incorrectly attributed the total cost of these expenditures.
Another link in that thread (as noted below), contains the actual amount of money:
> The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded CGI $55.7 million to launch Healthcare.gov, its central Obamacare health exchange website. Over the full five years of the contract, CGI could receive as much as $93.7 million.
$650m turns into $55m real quick and I'd bet a lot of fixed costs for things like hardware and software licenses made the actual figure even smaller. That was for two years, so $28M a year or $2.3M a month. Considering the cost of developers alone that doesn't seem like a ton, especially when developers are only a small part of the challenge.
I'm glad I didn't get the contract. I sure wouldn't want to build an exchange to handle many billions of dollars worth of transactions (and be responsible for millions of tax records!) on that kind of budget. Doubly so with talk radio , Fox News and the WSJ watching my every move.
If a startup came up with a way for any American to buy health insurance in one place it would be valued in the billions of dollars (even with a fail whale on demo day).
Personally, I don't think that the $650m has to apply for the one contract (healthcare.gov) for the general act to be quested like the post above ('and we get THIS')?
As for your math - sounds reasonable, but wow my expectations of what $55m can yield are vastly different than how you rationalized it.