Obama administration to end contract with company behind HealthCare.gov

The requirements for working with the USGov are restrictive enough that only specific companies are capable of participating in the bidding process. The Democratic party itself and Obama's re-election are, by contrast, private organizations that are not limited by these rules.

Basically, it seems like the government sourcing process has shrunk the pool of potential bidders too small to provide a properly competitive marketplace for software for USGov customers.

Harper Reed (CTO of Obama for America, who can be credited for those articles you're referring to) and Clay Johnson (CEO of the Dept for Better Technology) wrote an op-ed addressing what they see as the root cause for this kind of failure: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/25/opinion/getting-to-the-bot...

Well, think this out a bit farther. Let's say the SNAFU coefficient of a piece of software is 5%. If you're using the software to manage your election campaign, you lose 5% of your digital premium (over traditional electioneering using posters and TV commercials and other one-size-fits-all mass communication media), most of whom will presumably vote for The Other Candidate - that's bad, but you can just as easily lose the same or larger with a careless remark (eg Mitt Romney's casual dismissal of 47% of the electorate as 'takers' at the last election which ended up alienating an awful lot of swing voters even though he was obviously pandering to his audience of wealthy donors at the time he said that).

But put that in the government, and you're potentially disenfranchising 5% of the citizenry which is not only politically foolish but quite likely illegal, given constitutional requirements about equal treatment and so forth. If you have to provide universal service of some kind, then your marginal costs go way up. Suppose 99% correctness were the acceptable standard, such that Social Security, Medicare, VA etc. could just ditch that 1% of claimants that caused the most administrative problems; the administrative savings would probably be far more than 1%, I'm guessing more like 10-15% because once the administrative burden of dealing with a given citizen rose above 1 or 2 standard deviations you could just dump them from the system and cut your losses.

> The government could have easily paid 10% of what they did to a tech start-up

And when it failed, the government would be criticized for hiring a start-up to do a job that was obviously so enormous that only a big established contractor could take it on. And rightfully so.

Would you take that contract? I sure wouldn't. Something this big, and this failure prone, and which is being used as a political football besides...no amount of money is worth that.

I rather think that depends on what technological expertise the the start-up brought to bear on the problem.

I understand it's chic to think that Healtcare.gov is "just another website", especially among a certain crowd who think that all development is web development, and best done on a MacbookPro using RoR/node/<functional language Y>/Go + <insert fad-of-the-day JS framework here>. It's a mistaken impression, though, because we aren't talking about some from-scratch system. We're talking about communication with and between a lot of legacy systems requiring what is almost certainly a frankenstein-like nightmare of patchwork APIs that dive into programming languages and styles hipster 20-somethings at hot S.F. Start Up X wouldn't understand because it's beneath them (I'm exaggerating and generalizing here for effect--this isn't to impugn all 20-somethings, start-ups, etc.).

Honestly I don't think there is any contractor who could have pulled this project off flawlessly, or even very much better than the group of misfits who did Healthcare.gov did, just because of the sheer complexity of the project compounded with the increased politically-motivated interference from government officials that comes with such high-profile projects.

Accenture taking over is like replacing dumb & dumber with larry, moe and curly.

Accenture is Arthur Andersen, and they've got a long history of extracting maximum value for shareholders from government contracts (state and local).

EDIT:

Arthur Andersen spawned Andersen Consulting spawned Arthur Anderson Business Consulting spawned Accenture. Some of AABC splintered off and joined Hitachi Consulting, some went elsewhere.

The history of computer consulting is varied, interesting, and tragic.

The website for California's exchange is still broken; it's broken so badly that the customer support phone # the site tells you to call is outright rejecting calls (lots of people having issues). You get a recorded message saying that due to high call volumes you should (slightly paraphrased) go fuck yourself and use the nonfunctional website.

They have an online chat queue for customer support that's similarly busted; you sit in the queue for hours with the ETA randomly changing before it says you've been booted out of the queue.

I've always been under the impression that accenture were a "bums on seats" consultancy, graduates cranking out low quality java code.

California exchange site sucked big time at the start and still sucks, but I've heard stories of people I know that actually signed up there. So compared to healthcare.gov it works better. Compared to normal proper site it's a disaster (or at least was couple of months ago when I last checked) but I guess good enough for government work.

>Am I the only one who thinks that the failures were intentional - that the whole mix-up is a passive-aggressive way of herding the USA into eventual single-payer?

Probably not the only one. I don't think they were intentional, but I pray you're right because single-payer is a much superior system.

Depends on what you mean by intentional. I'm not sure if the guys that call the shots are Machiavellian enough for such things - given how incompetent they are in everything else, hard to imagine they would be super-competent in long-reaching plots. If they had been able to execute long-running plans of such magnitude with such certainty, they wouldn't screw up so many things so badly as they had.

However, the resulting vector of their efforts and failures may very well point into that direction, and not without their cooperation and help, since once they beat insurance industry into full dependency and make the population rely on subsidized care, the next logical step would be to eliminate the middlemen - there would be no point for them to exist anymore, at least not as independent entities - given that they would have no independence as such and serve no useful function in such setup.

I wouldn't say I'm surprised, but it definitely is not necessarily usual.

Companies usually win contracts of this magnitude because they "have people who know people". Consequently, "CGI Federal" is, or at least was, well connected with the people in government necessary to shovel boondoggles their way. It is what it is.

I guess in this case the poor optics overcame the connections.

Slightly surprised, but only because I would have thought that the company had kept up their payments to the necessary campaign funds.