

We paid over $500M for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404 - timhargis
http://www.digitaltrends.com/opinion/obamacare-healthcare-gov-website-cost/#ixzz2hKq2BK1a

======
philfreo
Serious question... where does all that money go? Are a few people personally
making many millions off this deal? Or are there really hundreds or thousands
of employees working on it? Or is it getting subcontracted out many times with
each layer taking a slice?

~~~
jakejake
I'd imagine it's a gravy train gig all around. The payoff can be very large,
but the government makes you jump through all manner of hoops at every stage
of the way. I've actually done government work at the state level (ironically
working on healthcare systems) and it's crazy how difficult it is to get
anything accomplished.

To start with the proposal process is extremely intense and only a small
number of companies have the resources to even apply for a project like this.
The system I worked on was more simple than this and our proposal
documentation was hundreds of pages.

With this being such a hot political issue, I can't even imagine the politics
going on behind the scenes on top of any technical challenges. The number of
meetings and reviews was probably astronomical.

I have no doubt that some principles at CGI are making huge profits off of
projects like these, but it's not totally free money as it might seem.

------
gexla
Of course it's over budget. Once you get past the $100 million mark for a web
app, your estimation skills start breaking down a bit. But it's good when you
have a client who can print money and the private players in the DOD as
inspiration. Why not go over budget? You aren't doing a government contract
right unless you are going way over budget.

I would love to send out an invoice for over $100 million. Even better would
be to pick up the phone and tell the government that you are burning through
the cash and you will need another $100 million to keep going. Who is their
senior developer? Kobe Bryant? Their development team? The L.A. Lakers?
"Sorry, Kobe is refusing to write another line of code until we renew his
contract."

------
threeseed
RTFA everyone.

The website cost $93.7m. The rest of the money went to infrastructure, call
centre, collection services and building out the state based exchanges.

~~~
dave_sullivan
Now to be fair... $93.7m at $170 per hour is 551,176 billable hours. Now, it's
certainly not a one man job--maybe a team of 20 ought to do it? That leaves
27,558 hours per person. Divide that by 40 and it looks like you're going to
be running a team of 20 for 688 weeks at 40 hours per week of billable hours.
688 weeks is 13 years.

So that amount will get you a team of 20 working for 13 years straight. Bump
it up to a team of 40 and you get 6.5 years.

Regardless, I'm in the wrong business...

~~~
jakejake
The calculations also work out for a team of 30 working for $50/hour and 5
guys with really large yachts

~~~
stefan_kendall
This tracks with other government contracts I've heard about. Although it's
usually 2-3 guys with a couple yachts.

And I'm not kidding about the yachts. Actual confirmed yacht purchases.

------
ck2
This very same article was on the front page all day today.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6526761](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6526761)

HealthCare.gov cost $93.7 million, which is still outrageous.

~~~
timhargis
Looks like they adjusted the figure - earlier it was at $634 million from what
I saw but now it looks like it's closer to $500 million. Regardless, it's
still a ridiculous amount...

~~~
oscilloscope
The cost of the Iraq War was over $800 billion. Over a ten year period, I
would expect the cost of national healthcare to be on the order of ~1 trillion
dollars.

$500 million is 0.05% of $1 trillion.

------
dude3
I went to CGI's website. It says offshoring. The javascript on healthcare.gov
looks like they hired someone on Odesk.

~~~
rozap
Yea I don't think the programmers got the cash. Though I'll bet some
executives from CGI are probably are taking a pretty nice holiday right about
now.

------
learc83
"the bulk of which ($88 million) went to CGI Federal, the company awarded a
$93.7 million contract to build Healthcare.gov and other technology portions
of the FFEs"

What are the "other technology portions".

If part of the other technology is building the infrastructure to allow
hundreds of insurance companies to access very sensitive data from millions of
customers, then that number seems a lot more reasonable.

------
1945
That's a drop in the bucket when you compare it to the 1.4 trillion spent
funding the ~12 year war on terror.

What I'm saying is I'd much rather see the money spent on healthcare.

~~~
InclinedPlane
It may have escaped your attention but currently web dev is not considered a
medical profession. I suppose one could say that they would rather see the
money spent on healthcare bureaucracy, but that's a bit of a weaker statement
I guess.

~~~
1945
Of course this notion never cross my mind. What I was eluding to was money
spent facilitating healthcare is money well spent, even if they overspent.
After all, we are talking about the U.S. Government.

------
donniefitz2
There's a 5,534 line file (dummyData.js) and a 6000+ line (register.js) file,
un-minified, with with global functions currently on the site. I would be
fired for putting this sort of thing into production. For the $, there's no
excuse for this.

[https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/js/ee/du...](https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/js/ee/dummyData.js)
[https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/registra...](https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/registration.js)

------
jaggederest
Think of the company you could build - build one federal website for all of
your seed, A, B, and C rounds of funding in one bundle, with no equity loss.

------
JacksonGariety
$500 million and it still has scheduled maintenance:

[https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/registra...](https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/registration)

------
incanus77
[http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/10/08/230424...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/10/08/230424841/health-
exchange-tech-problems-point-to-a-thornier-issue)

------
rebelidealist
The irony is the CTO of the US Todd Park founded two Health IT companies.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Park](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Park)

------
dmazin
A bit too meta maybe, but that's a great headline.

Because who the hell is getting that commission? Where are the people making
this magical money?

