
Why the New Obamacare Website Is Going to Work This Time - brandonb
http://www.wired.com/2014/06/healthcare-gov-revamp/
======
brandonb
A bunch of the folks in this article are Y Combinator or Google alumni, and
we're giving a talk on Saving HealthCare.gov next Thursday in SF for anyone
who's interested:

[http://www.eventbrite.com/e/saving-healthcaregov-
tickets-118...](http://www.eventbrite.com/e/saving-healthcaregov-
tickets-11850173187?aff=hn)

Let us know if you have questions! Or if you want to help.

UPDATE: we seem to be sold out. Trying to find a larger venue. In the
meantime, feel free to sign up on the waiting list and you'll get an email as
soon as we find a room with more capacity.

~~~
pdeuchler
Not to start a political flame war, but...

How do you, as technologically savvy people who are in a better position than
most to understand the grave transgressions of the NSA, reconcile your support
of an administration that has shown complete disregard for our privacy and
civil liberties (specifically within the scope of the NSA/Snowden scandal)
with your inherent duty, as an engineer of powerful systems, to above all
further the public good? As a subtext, what are your thoughts on continuing to
further said administration's political aims in one arena while they restrict
your rights and livelihood* in another?

Furthermore, and more on topic, what steps have you taken to place privacy
concerns at the forefront when creating a service that consumes vast amounts
of personal and medical information from millions of people?

Last, as someone who has been "on the inside" do you see corruption as a large
problem with government procurement? To what extent did corruption create the
situation that you were called in to fix with the original HealthCare.gov
fiasco?

*assuming, of course, that the NSA/Snowden revelations have hurt US tech interests

Edit: Mods, if you disapprove of this comment feel free to delete it. That
said, I think these are some important questions that need to be asked.

~~~
redthrowaway
You can both support building a tool to give people healthcare and be against
government surveillance. Most people are able to compartmentalize their
support or opposition for various government policies and do not see the doing
of one thing they don't like as a reason not to support any other thing the
government does.

~~~
pdeuchler
That's kind of my question though, is how do you compartmentalize that? This
may be a personal character flaw, but I definitely wouldn't be able to.

The NSA revelations aren't just some small political transgressions, this is a
rather world shaking development that shows we have been subject to vast,
malicious (i.e. not for our good but for the good of others), and illegal
surveillance that has steadily eroded many of our God given* rights and
liberties. On top of that, this is something the administration has
wholeheartedly supported and gotten in bed with, and shows no signs of turning
back (beyond token political acts that will in the end accomplish very little,
if anything).

So, wouldn't you question further actions by someone who has proven themselves
to act against you so wholeheartedly? Myself, while I normally would have been
overjoyed at a healthcare overhaul in this country, am now extremely
suspicious of the motivations behind it. Why would this administration act in
our favor when they have been acting against us for so long?

Thus, my question to brandonb :)

*as per the Declaration of Independence

Edit: I would say a good analogy would be: Assuming I were Charlie Brown, at
what point do I begin to doubt Lucy's psychiatric advice when she's pulled the
football out from under me so many times?

~~~
tunesmith
The government isn't one thing. It might be worth doing some reading on
systems thinking, for instance some of the writing by Donella Meadows. People
inhabit a government system and they either set boundaries for themselves, or
have those boundaries asserted onto them; boundaries between their area of
influence and other areas of the system they consider out of bounds. If they
didn't, no one would be able to focus and get things done.

People often think that the failings of a system are chiefly because of the
motivations of the actors in the system. But what's more accurate is that the
failings are often because of the structure of the system, and the inhabitants
often don't feel they have the ability to change the structure.

The least effective way to change the behavior of a system is to twiddle the
various buttons and knobs that each inhabitant has ready access to. The most
effective way to change the behavior of a system is to change the overall goal
of the system, which would necessitate a complete restructuring.

So that's why it is easy to believe that various NSA wrongdoings aren't
entirely because of nefarious motivations (although that is probably part of
it), and very much driven by system structure (log and analyze data) that
simply weren't "checked" as their technological tools and abilities increased
over time. What many of us have failed to realize is that our own personal
security has been a form of security-through-obscurity in the past. We can put
personal data up on a website and not tell anyone, and before search spiders,
it might have stayed private. But we can't expect such a website to stay
private these days, because of how technology has increased. It's the same
with our private data, and how our browsing habits can be mined to create
freakishly accurate personal profiles. There was never any privacy protection
there to begin with other than obscurity, and we just convinced ourselves it
was there by believing in social mores that hadn't been challenged until
technology increased too much.

Meanwhile, the health system was about constructing an entirely new
structure/system for health insurance, benefits, and penalties.

So... I wouldn't say it is a matter of compartmentalizing. It's more a matter
of appreciating that the government is a huge collection of disparate systems
and motivations, and that there can be simultaneous breakdowns and successes.

~~~
pdeuchler
First, thanks for the book recommendation... the quickest way to my heart is
giving me something interesting to read.

While I mostly agree with you, it's important to realize that a single
administration (speaking directly of the President, his close advisors, and
officials he has put in place) has both encouraged the NSA in their actions
and also produced the ACA. At what point do we write off the machinations of a
political machine as the intricacies of a complicated system, or vice versa?
Do we merely ignore common threads that point to a single motive as
conspiratorial thinking, or do we act assuming the worst?

I'm not so naive as to think the NSA has become what it is through the
directions of a single person or group. I mostly agree that you hit the nail
on the head, but the fact remains that many people in our current
administration were given a high level overview of current processes,
projects, and operations and gave the O.K. to not only continue in the current
direction, but intensified efforts, brushing aside the consequences and
ramifications that only a stupid person would have ignored. And I refuse to
believe that these people got to where they are via stupidity.

~~~
waps
If you honestly think like this what do you think people should do that live
under more invasive governments ? Even most of Europe has more invasive data
collection laws (in all European countries, the secret service and the IRS
equivalent can tap/copy/... anything they want to without warrants, and any
cooperation they request must be freely given on pain of imprisonment. Anybody
who's worked at a Euro ISP knows this. Nobody ever mentions it for some
reason)

All European ISPs must give a certain organisation a command shell (sort-of)
that allows them to copy any and all traffic to a specific customer without
the ISP even knowing they're doing it. They have to do this for free and
provide free tech support. This is why cisco, alcatell, juniper, HP, ... both
produce "lawful intercept" versions of all their network software [1].
Installation of these images in most of the world (not just Europe) is not
optional.

Unlike in the US, the ISPs never get to see any warrants. Asking for that is a
crime, that can land you in prison. "Obstructing" justice can also land both
directors and techies in jail (ie. not promptly providing prompt tech support
to idiot police officers who wonder why tapping an ADSL line does not tell
them when the tapped person checks gmail on their phone). There are not
allowed to be limitations. For example if you are an American customer of an
ISP that operates in Europe, they can tap you (e.g. Liberty Global). And
obviously, the government refuses to pay anything for the quite substantial
effort required to implement all this.

ISPs only deal with a certain central organisation (it's more-or-less
interpol) that basically gives open tapping to a list of European
organisations that doesn't fit on a single page, and several organisations
that aren't even European.

So given this, what do you think the entire European telco, government, and
... industry should do ? Keep in mind that people working for this
infrastructure is probably around 50 million people.

[1]
[http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/lan/catalyst65...](http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/lan/catalyst6500/ios/12-2SX/lawful/intercept/book/65LIch2.html)

------
Agathos
There are plenty more government IT projects for them to save next. The scale
of these failures is mind-boggling, and Healthcare.gov wasn't nearly the
worst. Here's one I just read about yesterday, might be good for their next
project:

[http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2013/11/26/Another-
Fa...](http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2013/11/26/Another-Failed-Gov-t-
Tech-Project-Cost-11-Billion)

That's $1.1 billion lost, another $4 billion planned. I can't even imagine
what I'd demand of a $4 billion piece of software.

~~~
brandonb
If you're interested in helping with this or any other government project,
feel free to email jobs@hcgov.us or attend the talk mentioned elsewhere in the
thread! There are lots of ways to get involved.

------
akoumjian
The question I have is, how do we get government to hire teams like this in
the first place?

~~~
bicknergseng
Build a federal gov run IT branch that isn't the NSA instead of contracting
things like this out?

~~~
brandonb
Good idea. If you're interested in this type of thing, check out 18F, which is
a brand-new engineering office run from within the government in San Francisco
and DC: [https://18f.gsa.gov/](https://18f.gsa.gov/)

~~~
bicknergseng
Very cool. Taking a look and signed up for the Eventbrite above.

------
vinhboy
So... are we going to get any of our taxpayer money back from the people who
fucked up the first time?

On another note I am really delighted to see that the government was forced to
step out of their bubble to make this happen.

~~~
sp332
Nope, in fact we're still giving them money for new projects.
[http://www.cgi.com/en/media-announcement](http://www.cgi.com/en/media-
announcement)

------
spacemanmatt
We built a NEW website, and it's going to WORK this time. Not like that last
time, that only took us up 30 feet into the air then dropped us. And when it
DOES work, you're gonna turn to me and say, "Dude, this rocks." And I'll be
like, "Dude, I TOLD you it was gonna be sweet."

------
sp332
Why is this using Amazon servers? Wouldn't it make more sense to use purpose-
built machines for this?

~~~
toomuchtodo
No. You serve the static assets from a CDN, but the authentication and dynamic
content generation need to scale very quickly when you have an in rush of
traffic. This is the perfect use case for Amazon AWS (GovCloud, specifically).

EDIT: Disclaimer: I did not work on Healthcare.gov, but did study up on the
entire architecture while trying for a gig on the recovery team.

~~~
sp332
How many servers are we talking here, anyway? Like 1 rack's worth or what?

~~~
ceejayoz
It's highly variable because of the way health insurance in the US works.

There's an "enrollment" period where you can switch/reenroll in your plan. It
only lasts a few weeks to a few months in the end of the year. During that
period, load is immense.

Outside that period, there's extremely low traffic, as only people who have
"qualifying events" are eligible to shop for insurance - if you get married,
divorced, lose a job, etc.

Letting someone else figure out what to do with 95% of your server capacity
for 10ish months out of the year is a pretty decent cost savings for the
government, I'd imagine.

------
jonatanheyman
I hope they're performing load tests this time, which apparently was not done
properly for the first version.

------
dreamdu5t
Talk is cheap.

------
bkurtz13
> David Chang, a 2102 MIT graduate

So that's how they're doing it, they got a programmer from the future to help!

~~~
jusben1369
Well the US federal government has more resources than most so it strikes me
as a smart move to do this. I suspect they were holding off announcing that
they've solved time travel closer to the congressional elections to help out
the Democrats but the cats out of the bag now.

------
Subetei36
How do they measure success? If something costs 1000x what it would have in
the market and still strives for adequacy it's already proof of failure. If
any of us failed so spectacularly we'd go bankrupt and another service would
be used (and there would be plenty of choices if regulations/poor law services
didn't dissuade people from creating this kind of service).

Now we have people that were productive at companies making services we pay
for of our own volition spending time on this thing that doesn't work as a
symptom, not a cause. So confused why this is a thing.

