Comment by rbhobe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rbhobe | Hacker News Reader

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I'm part of a small team of expats from Silicon Valley that came out to DC last year to help fix healthcare.gov. (Mostly Stanford, Google, YCombinator folks) We've learned a ton, and see an opportunity to create software that radically improves how our government serves its people - we've started our company, Nava, to chase that vision.

In the last 6 months, we've launched 2 major projects:

- App 2.0, the new insurance application for healthcare.gov. It's processing 70% of apps coming through the marketplace, and: converts 35% more people than the old app, gets them through in half the time, is mobile-friendly (20% of apps), sits on robust, scalable infrastructure, etc etc. It was the first system that CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service) ever hosted on Amazon AWS.

- Scalable Login System (SLS), the new identity management system for healthcare.gov. Sadly, the main achievement here is that the system is actually up and available, unlike its predecessor. It's now saving the taxpayer $70M in annual maintenance costs.

Here's a Wired article from last summer about us: http://www.wired.com/2014/06/healthcare-gov-revamp/

Our momentum is strong, the problem is important, and we're looking for good people.

If you're the type that would get fired up about reimagining broken government experiences and technology, please drop us a line at jobs@navahq.com, we'd love to hear from you!

Let me get this straight. We spent hundreds of millions of dollars buiding a bad website. You then get hired to fix it. Again paid by taxpayer dollars. Now you are running a private company that will benefit greatly from this work. And, presumably, the company has investors who will now ride a sweet ride to massive profits because of all of the above.

I hope I am wrong. I hope 100% of your work was funded privately. Otherwise you and your investors are nothing but a bunch of thieves. In other words, a perfect fit for government irrespective of party affilliation.

If I am wrong I apologize profusely. Someone does have to ask these questions. There is absolutely no accountability in government. They lie to us and burn our cash lavishly. Try to tell the IRS that you deleted all your financial records and emails or lie to Congress or any Federal agency and see how quickly you end up in jail.

Just sick of it.

Reboot -- you make no sense. Private contractors are hired all the time by the Government. They did work, delivered something of quality, and got paid for it. It's not thievery at all.

Let's say you own a company. You hire a group of programmers to come in and fix or develop some code. You pay them a lot of money for this work. When they are done they use the code YOU PAID FOR to form a company, attract investors and go into business.

That is theft.

Is this company using code and tools developed with taxpayer money to now profit? Are investors going to profit from something that we paid for and should rightfully be in the public domain.

What I said makes complete sense provided the scenario I painted is correct.

What would it look like to not be considered theft? Something like this: The government needs help fixing the Obamacare website. A group of investors gets together to fund the required work. They compete for the contract with others. One wins the contract. They offer their services at a reasonable cost. The government stipulates that all software developed under this contract will be open source and in the public domain. The company completes the work. Now it can apply for a contract to maintain and enhance the codebase. And so can anyone else. We, the taxpayers, paid for the code and own it. We did not pay to fund a for profit company that would then hild us hostage, have a monopoly based on what should be a public open source code base and create millions of dollars of profit for investors who did not fund the development of that code and took none of the risk.

For all I know these folks are on the level. If that's the case I apologize with all sincerity. Still, I would like to see a statement clarifying whether or not a substantial portion of their now-commercial code base was paid for with taxpayer dollars under "war emergency" conditions and if they are effectively stealing what should be owned by the people of the US in order to form the foundation of a company that is probably going to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars per year with a virtual monopoly. I'd like to see that question answered.

It's not theft. In fact, many companies are started this way. As long as they negotiate a contract that retains or licenses code use, they're good.

Businesses do this to each other all the time. Why should Government be special? I don't believe the software would have been written in the first place if your idealistic regulations were in existence, and the people who'd be at a loss would be.... the taxpayers! If the service that way paid for was delivered and the contract made the proper stipulations, this is all fine and dandy.

Also, "we the taxpayers own it" if it's open-source is also not true. If the BSD license was put to use, for example, then any company could go off and make money using the source code.

The story of healthcare.gov is that one set of federal contractors totally messed it up, and that another group of folks managed to get it back on track. It's not reasonable to claim that the latter group is somehow profiting unethically from the failure of the former.

Hey, I'm interested in learning more about your work and the team. Just curious if this is your website - http://navahq.com/

Very interesting! Their website has a funny placeholder YouTube video and nothing more. Can anyone confirm that this is indeed a legitimate jobs email address? Couldn't find anything about them on LinkedIn or anywhere else and the article doesn't mention this company, so it'd be nice to verify since it sounds like a pretty interesting team to join.

Hi Stephen, I'm the OP. As you noticed, our website is in the process of going up, but isn't quite there yet :) We'll be on Linkedin etc once the site is up.

If you're interested in learning more, happy to chat - shoot me an email at rohan@navahq.com!

Hi, I'm the OP. Yup, that's our (current) website :) More professional version coming very shortly.

If you're interested in learning more about us, happy to chat - shoot me an email at rohan@navahq.com!

I'm curious as to what will happen when a republican gets elected and repels obamacare in 2016?

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