government has no competition so even if government employees perform poorly they will still have job security. customers can't just go next door to the competition if they are dissatisfied with the service. this is why healthcare.org was way over budget and they couldn't get it to work until seasoned veterans from the competitive world of corporate tyrannies came to the rescue. the unaccountable corporate tyrannies donated their star employees out of concern for externalities. competitive spirit only occurs in securing the government contract. government employees responsible for the oversight can easily be fooled by the contractor and won't have incentive to do a good job because even if they make mistakes chances are they won't get fired and the GOVERNMENT NEVER GOES OUT OF BUSINESS.
if healthcare.org is owned by corporate tyranny, it's services would be an API that could be reused by exchanges, insurance providers and other government agencies. but it's owned by the government so there is no need for efficiency and cost saving because there is no competition that can put the government out of business.
silicon valley coming to the rescue might support the leftist narrative about the goodness of human beings. actually it's still bad news because genius engineers only represent about .01% of the population. the real test was the number of young and healthy who bought health insurance to help pay for the sick even if they can get health insurance after being diagnosed with a disease. the number was abysmal so this is another proof human nature of american is not compatible with a social democracy.
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Development of the website's interface as well as its supporting back-end services, to make sure that the website could work to help people compare between health insurance plans, were both outsourced to private companies. The front-end of the website was developed by the startup Development Seed.[2] The back-end work was contracted out to CGI Federal Inc., a subsidiary of the Canadian IT multinational CGI Group, which subcontracted the work to other companies as is common on large government contracts.[11] CGI was also responsible for building some of the state-level healthcare exchanges, with varying levels of success (some did not open on schedule).[9]
According to author and journalist John J. Xenakis,[better source needed] CGI Federal's attempt in Massachusetts is characterized as a complete failure. In Xenakis' view, despite the Massachusetts connector being the type of website which a small team of five to ten could create in a few months on a 10 million dollar budget, a team of around 300 with a 200 million dollar budget failed. Xenakis claims CGI Federal were likely to have hired many incompetent programmers due to Massachusetts transferring the development contract to another firm, Optum Inc. The software created by CGI was of poor quality and unusable by Optum, who had to start from scratch. CGI has also been accused of committing fraudulent tests and reports to those in charge of oversight. [19] Similar problems occurred in many other states. [19][citation needed][better source needed]
According to John J. Xenakis,[better source needed] the Obama administration granted way too much money to create the federal and individual state websites, which led to large, unmanageable teams which contained many incompetent programmers. It also encouraged fraud and overspending by programmers. [19][citation needed][better source needed]
Specifically, aspects of HealthCare.gov relating to digital identity authentication were assigned to Experian. Quality Software Services, Inc. (QSSI) also played a role. The total number of companies enlisted in the website's creation, and their names, has not been disclosed by the Department of Health and Human Services.[11] The whole effort was officially coordinated by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), an agency that commentators such as journalists David Perera and Sean Gallagher have speculated was ill-suited to that task. Social activist and technologist Clay Johnson later said that the federal government had issues come up given that it "leans towards a write-down-all-the-requirements-then-build-to-those-requirements type of methodology" not well suited to current IT[20] especially when government contractors are focused on maximizing profits.[21]
"The firms that typically get contracts are the firms that are good at getting contracts, not typically good at executing on them," Alex Howard, a fellow at the Harvard Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, remarked to The Verge as he evaluated the back-end of the project. In contrast, the web-magazine's journalist Adrianne Jeffries praised the successful use of an "innovative" startup business for the front-end. However, she found the overall rollout "bone-headed".[11]
The Obama administration repeatedly modified regulations and policies until summer 2013, meaning contractors had to deal with changing requirements. However, changing requirements are by no means unusual in a large, expensive custom software project; they are a well-known factor in historical project failures, and methodologies such as agile software development have been developed to cope with them. Unfortunately, regulations pertaining to large government contracts in many countries, including the United States, are not a good match for agile software development.[2]
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(for more of my knowledge bombs, click the "ian's knowledge bombs" banner at the top of this article and choose any article in the table of contents that piques your interest)
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