
Healthcare.gov has disappeared from CMSGov's GitHub account - jliechti1
https://github.com/CMSgov/
======
kmfrk
This comes after the intense backlash following the squashing of the project's
entire contributor/commit history.

I was wondering why the issue complaining about this didn't have any recent
updates.

\---

EDIT: It looks like some people may have used the Issues system to launch
asinine political bromides against Obamacare proper - that were and are
completely impertinent to the GitHub project. This could have been part of the
reasoning for closing off the repo, but I've never dealt with users basically
defacing my Issues system, so I don't know what your options are as repo owner
in a situation like that.

~~~
goshakkk
They could've just disabled issues if a lot of people were abusing them... Why
close the repo?

~~~
tannerc
To bring in the cleanup crew? Or "teach the kids a lesson" perhaps?

Whatever the reasoning, kmfrk's comment rings true: wasn't this all about
transparency?

~~~
pyre
Didn't you hear? Transparency isn't one of the essential core parts of the
government, so it was shutdown, pending a budget compromise.

------
joeyh

      commit 56ef8da2e73712ddabc5f2f2907e62faa4e0e68e
      Author: Andrew Newhouse <andrewwn@gmail.com>
      Date:   Wed Jul 3 14:02:11 2013 -0400
      
          Initial Commit
    

This was the first and only commit. So it didn't reflect the actual website
anyway. There are bugs in the website such as incorrect email address
validation that are not present in this code dump.

Since this is public domain software, I will put a copy of the git repo on
Archive.org when I get a free hour.

~~~
joeyh
[https://archive.org/details/healthcare-gov-
gitrepo](https://archive.org/details/healthcare-gov-gitrepo)

------
ams1
They also removed the statement on their developer site
([https://www.healthcare.gov/developers/](https://www.healthcare.gov/developers/))
that "EVERYTHING we do will be published on Github." Here's a screenshot of
the cached version:
[http://cl.ly/image/0f0R2x2l0w1t](http://cl.ly/image/0f0R2x2l0w1t)

~~~
mgraczyk
It still says "We’re making our source code freely available on GitHub."

------
lifeformed
I've never used a buggier website before. Half the links were broken, the
application process just wouldn't proceed halfway through (until I tried again
today), I get giant error boxes every other page, and it just plain wouldn't
do anything in Chrome.

It says I have to "Review my application details" before I can go further, and
sends me to:

    
    
      https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/auth/OH/en_US/myAccount?appId=%=applicationId%%3E#applications
    

Yes, that's the actual link. The variable name "%=applicationID%" is directly
in there, and so it just sends me to a broken link. This is one of many broken
links I've come across, this one just happens to be an essential step in the
application process.

~~~
sams99
they actually never open sourced marketplace for some reason

------
STRML
If anyone's interested, I've been working on an issue tracker & locally
runnable version of the marketplace in a new repo[1] that was spawned from the
former issue tracker on the removed repository.

It has some issues with hardcoded redirects coming back from their API calls,
but it's a start.

I originally made it just to simply demonstrate how a few small changes could
make a large performance difference, but I've kept it up due to encouragement
from some friends and hopes that somebody inside the project will use some of
the code or make changes based on it.

[1] [https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-
Marketplace](https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace)

~~~
ricardobeat
Is this actual production code? [https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-
Marketplace/blob/mas...](https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-
Marketplace/blob/master/app/js/ee/)

It's way below the quality you'd expect from a modern front-end. Poor
standards, undocumented code, monolithic sources, hard-coded data all around.
Despite using Backbone and other modern frameworks, it looks like something a
novice JS developer would concoct, not a project in the millions...

My favorite part so far ([https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-
Marketplace/blob/mas...](https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-
Marketplace/blob/master/app/js/ee/eeCommon.js#L363-L377)):

    
    
        //got this from the internets
        //fetchs the URL parameters
        function getUrlVars()
        {
        ...

~~~
knowtheory
Remember how this went down.

DevelopmentSeed (the guys behind MapBox) designed & developed a frontend site
and then handed it over to HHS. That's where the good stuff comes from.
Clearly however, whoever received the project from that point onwards doesn't
understand things like asset minification or packaging.

My completely random conjecture is that whoever inherited DevelopmentSeed's
code does not know how this stuff should work.

Also see:
[http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2013/10/pro...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2013/10/problems_with_healthcare_gov_cronyism_bad_management_and_too_many_cooks.html)

------
ck2
Remember that healthcare.gov was created by two different groups.

The front-end people did an okay job.

The back-end people is the Canadian company that has messed up.

~~~
bhauer
I've not paid much attention to this, but your comment just hit me right in
the face. We spent $650M on this thing—and the three-orders-of-magnitude-too-
high price can only be explained by a nonsensical favoritism for firms that
can navigate our minefield of regulations and the selection process... and we
ended up selecting a Canadian firm?

I am not especially patriotic, though I also don't really think patriotism is
a bad thing. Nevertheless, learning that the contract was awarded to a
Canadian firm makes me reel. I mean no slight to Canadians, but if we are
going to overspend by 100x, let's at least send the money to our cronies in
the United States! Just for appearances.

~~~
flavor8
> We spent $650M on this thing

No, that's right wing spin. We spent $94M on this thing. Still absurd, but
don't be misled by the spin campaign.

Also your math is off. A $10M price tag wouldn't be totally ridiculous.
Consider the cost of a team of 50, including QA, design, product guys,
engineers, management, lawyers, analysts, data entry, etc for a year. Add 30%
to cover risk.

So, it's somewhere in the 10x too expensive region.

~~~
yeukhon
94M for 50 people? Organizations like Mozilla has 900 employees and the
operation is probably around that. 94M that's almost 100M or 0.1 billion.

~~~
w0rd-driven
94M for 50 absolute "rock stars" of course. At nearly a mil a pop for a years
worth of sweat, swearing, and extremely undue stress </sarcasm>. I do have a
small bit of sympathy for the obvious peons that did the bulk of the work. If
the comments above regarding how this functions is any indication, these are
certainly not "rock stars" but more likely intern/severely junior developers.
A consulting place like this obviously can't afford to put their best and
brightest on this but they sure can take the money as if they did. If they're
suggesting this was their best and brightest work, they need to seriously
evaluate their "ability" to handle web development of this magnitude. 650M
total for yet more projects of this level of trash? Cancel the contract now
while you still can and save at least _some_ face.

------
jonknee
The code that was on there has nothing to do with what people are clamoring
about... It was just the informational side. The /marketplace stuff was not
open source (nor would it be very useful considering it would be very
dependent on the specific stack of private databases and APIs that it taps
into).

------
yelnatz
I guess they used some of that money to pay for a private repo.

~~~
brickcap
lol

------
rurounijones
I wonder if the newer commits would be along the lines of "Shit! XYZ had
massive bug, we have done a hacky workaround for the moment" which might not
do their company image much good.

~~~
smsm42
That's easy to hide - just write in the commit "Fix issue 65438" and nobody's
the wiser :) Of course, analyzing diffs can uncover the truth but if the fix
already deployed that's not the worst position to be in.

------
ErikAugust
As far as I know, the public repo was outdated and assumed to be 'for show',
so to speak.

Now that the show has turned ugly - why not just cancel the show?

~~~
laurenstill
That was my understanding as well... so if it's out of date, why bother taking
it down, and changing their policies in the middle of a PR shitstorm. Seems to
just add fuel to the fire...

~~~
ErikAugust
I agree. The whole thing now strikes me as extra phony and bizarre.

------
noveltysystems
$650 Million and we get THIS?!?

~~~
jonknee
Where do you get your news? No where near $650m was spent on Healthcare.gov
(but, perhaps maybe it should considering the project grew considerably in
scope when so many states refused to setup their own exchanges).

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

~~~
jonknee
So as I thought, you were completely misinformed. The story for that link has
been updated:

> Correction: We miscalculated the expenditures related to the healthcare
> exchanges established under the Affordable Care Act, and incorrectly
> attributed the total cost of these expenditures.

Another link in that thread (as noted below), contains the actual amount of
money:

> The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded CGI $55.7 million
> to launch Healthcare.gov, its central Obamacare health exchange website.
> Over the full five years of the contract, CGI could receive as much as $93.7
> million.

$650m turns into $55m real quick and I'd bet a lot of fixed costs for things
like hardware and software licenses made the actual figure even smaller. That
was for two years, so $28M a year or $2.3M a month. Considering the cost of
developers alone that doesn't seem like a ton, especially when developers are
only a small part of the challenge.

I'm glad I didn't get the contract. I sure wouldn't want to build an exchange
to handle many billions of dollars worth of transactions (and be responsible
for millions of tax records!) on that kind of budget. Doubly so with talk
radio , Fox News and the WSJ watching my every move.

If a startup came up with a way for any American to buy health insurance in
one place it would be valued in the billions of dollars (even with a fail
whale on demo day).

~~~
nirvanatikku
Yea that article caused a lot of confusion amongst folks.

Personally, I don't think that the $650m has to apply for the one contract
(healthcare.gov) for the general act to be quested like the post above ('and
we get THIS')?

As for your math - sounds reasonable, but wow my expectations of what $55m can
yield are vastly different than how you rationalized it.

~~~
jonknee
It's a lot of money in some ways and not a lot of money in others. It's an
exchange that will be used by millions of people who will make decisions to
spend thousands of dollars a year... The amount the exchange costs is a
fraction of a rounding error in the scheme of things. I'm sure the insurance
companies themselves have spent vastly more just getting their systems set up.

------
bharathwaaj
[http://developmentseed.org/blog/new-healthcare-gov-is-
open-a...](http://developmentseed.org/blog/new-healthcare-gov-is-open-and-cms-
free/)

------
dvanduzer
Look guys, I'm gonna go on the record as pro Drupal+Mongo.

