Stay calm. Here’s what we paid for the Obamacare site:
[T]he fact that Healthcare.gov can’t do the one job it was built to do isn’t the most infuriating part of this debacle – it’s that we, the taxpayers, seem to have forked up more than $500 million of the federal purse to build the digital equivalent of a rock.
Update from a reader:
The Digital Trends piece on the cost of Healthcare.gov mis-read the government contract award documents and has walked back their “Healthcare.gov cost half a billion dollars” claim. Their post has been updated (rather mendaciously, I think). Here’s one blogger’s explanation of how they may have misread the contract costs.
Mike Masnick blames the way government hands out contracts:
[I]t appears that the federal government basically handed this project over to the same crew of giant government contractors, who have a long history of screwed up giant IT projects, and almost no sense of the “internet native” world.
The Sunlight Foundation (link above) figured out the list of contractors who worked on the site, and noted that the big ones not only are well-known DC power-player insiders, but they’re also big on the lobbying and political contributions side of things. You’ve got companies like… Booz Allen Hamilton, famous for promoting cyberwar hype and employing Ed Snowden. There’s defense contracting giant Northrup Grumman. Then there’s SAIC — which I can’t believe can still get government business. This is the same firm that famously was given a $380 million contract to revamp the FBI system, on which it went $220 million over budget, and then saw the entire system scrapped after it (literally) brought some users to tears, and the FBI realized it was useless in fighting terrorism. SAIC is also the company that NYC Mayor Bloomberg demanded return $600 million after a city computer project (budgeted at $68 million) actually cost $740 million. SAIC has a long list of similar spectacular failures on government IT projects.
Here’s what I don’t believe. I don’t believe the Obama campaign would have entrusted their polling and GOTV apparatus to these companies. So why do they take government less seriously than they do their own campaign? This is not the change we can believe in. And it better get fixed fast.
The Dish 