Anyone who believes that the PP-ACA will save us money or drive down healthcare costs is a raving lunatic. Period. In this, there can be no debate. Besides the fact – THE FACT* – that the math just simply does not work (and for a 8-minute lesson on that tune into Dave Ramsey’s video here), the poorly executed IT services surrounding the roll out of healthcare.gov is a giant, smoldering crater of government IT failures and debacles that sadly mirrors many government IT programs.

Look, GorT knows whereof he speaks here. He has over 20 years in and around federal government IT programs for a variety of different agencies, offices and departments. GorT has seen plenty of waste, fraud and abuse in his years working in this realm. So I was not really surprised when I read that the taxpayers footed a bill of roughly $500 Million to build this piece of crap website that is barely functional and clearly not ready for production use. The problem: they had a deadline and had to have something operational. The government by way of the U.S. Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) expended almost $394 Million from starting in FY10 and going through March 2013 to build the federally facilitated exchanges (FFEs) and some of the state exchanges. $363 Million of that $394M was spent on technology specific efforts and equipment to support the various exchanges. $88M went directly to CGI Federal** who has a $93.7M contract to build healthcare.gov and other technology components of the FFEs. This includes none of the administrative of salary costs for the CMS staff related to implementing PP-ACA. One can already sense that the $500M estimate is conservative.

As a point of comparison – one where traffic has been able to be handled in significant excess of what healthcare.gov has handled so far – Facebook operated for six years before spending more than $500M. Twitter ran for 5 years starting in 2006 expending only $360M. And the folks implementing healthcare.gov had these and other sites (LinkedIn, Vine, Instagram, etc.) to learn from.

So what’s the problem? Well, in GorT’s mind it is two-fold: (1) CGI Federal and it’s team (one can only assume in federal contracting that they assembled a team of subcontractors to help them build this*** system) failed plain and simple and (2) the government IT acquisition – meaning the letting and awarding of contracts for IT services and systems – is horribly broken.

Rather than rant some more, the folks over at Department of Better Technology – a company that does IT work for government entities and one that I have no ties to nor do I know anything of their reputation – posted this:

Not only did the site not scale at launch, it was riddled with errors, and it clearly wasn’t ready to go. Just taking a look at the code that runs the site, you can see that it’s riddled with “Lorem Ipsum Dolor” — the placeholder text that web designers and developers use to demonstrate designs before copy has been written. Reddit‘s gone wild with speculation about who built it and, of course, legions of IT experts have come out questioning the architecture of the website.

The contractors who made this website were at best sloppy, and at worst unqualified for the job. So, why? How did this happen to arguably the most important and lasting website of this president’s administration? And why did such sloppiness cost the taxpayer, from what I can tell, over 600 Million Dollars?

and goes on with:

Healthcare.gov got this way not because of incompetence or sloppiness of an individual vendor, but because of a deeply engrained and malignant cancer that’s eating away at the federal government’s ability to provide effective online services. It’s a cancer that’s shut out the best and brightest minds from working on these problems, diminished competition for federal work, and landed us here — where you have half-billion dollar websites that don’t work.

That cancer is called “procurement” and it’s primarily a culture driven cancer one that tries to mitigate so much risk that it all but ensures it. It’s one that allowed for only a handful of companies like CGI Federal to not only build disasters like this, but to keep building more and more failures without any accountability to the ultimate client: us. Take a look at CGI’s website, and the industries they serve: financial services, oil and gas, public utilities, insurance. Have you had a positive user experience**** in any of those industries?

Read the entire post here – they’re clearly spot on with this problem.  And yes, the government IS the problem in this case.  We should learn from this experience: 6,500+ pages of legislation and new processes, systems and government programs with their associated contracts, IT systems and everything else that hangs around that is NOT the way to operate.

‘Puter-style asterisk footnotes(TM):
* these are facts not any of that craptastic “post-normal science” where the facts are uncertain

** Sell GIB now before the news craters them.

*** Yes they did build this system.  If Obama believes that the government is such an integral part of building things, watch and see who gets the blame for the failures of the IT implementation.  Hint: see the above footnote.

**** GorT is in the business of focusing and delivering great user experiences.  It was and continues to be a huge problem in the IT industry.

GorT

GorT is an eight-foot-tall robot from the 51ˢᵗ Century who routinely time-travels to steal expensive technology from the future and return it to the past for retroinvention. The profits from this pay all the Gormogons’ bills, including subsidizing this website. Some of the products he has introduced from the future include oven mitts, the Guinness widget, Oxy-Clean, and Dr. Pepper. Due to his immense cybernetic brain, GorT is able to produce a post in 0.023 seconds and research it in even less time. Only ’Puter spends less time on research. GorT speaks entirely in zeros and ones, but occasionally throws in a ڭ to annoy the Volgi. He is a massive proponent of science, technology, and energy development, and enjoys nothing more than taking the Czar’s more interesting scientific theories, going into the past, publishing them as his own, and then returning to take credit for them. He is the only Gormogon who is capable of doing math. Possessed of incredible strength, he understands the awesome responsibility that follows and only uses it to hurt people.