keep your friends close but your enemies closer
Published on October 12, 2013 By Anthony R In Internet

I'm just really curious about a tech issue. How in 2013 can a website with an unlimited budget and years of planning fail? It has to be by design imo. There isn't any way such incompetence is achievable, it has to be intentional. It must be because the exchanges are so incomplete and expensive that the website was designed broken as a method of delay.


Comments (Page 1)
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on Oct 12, 2013

It's all smoke and mirrors,Wonder what is being hidden behind this Obama care facade.

Besides the usual corruption, I mean.

on Oct 12, 2013

How in 2013 can a website with an unlimited budget and years of planning fail? It has to be by design imo.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/canadian-officials-fired-it-firm-behind-troubled-obamacare-website/article/2537101

"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." - Jean Baptiste Alphonse Karr (1808-90).

on Oct 12, 2013

It was bungled pretty badly.  Even as someone who thinks the ACA is a net positive (though it's bad for me on a personal level), I'll admit it was bungled.

 

on Oct 12, 2013

This is what we get for so many idiots voting for "small government," pro-privatization candidates who support outsourcing government projects to private contractors. :/  Unfortunately its become ubiquitous among candidates on 'both' sides (yes, I vote for third party candidates but the vast majority of Americans ignore them and even scoff at those of us who vote for the candidate we think best suits us instead of limiting ourselves to 'lesser of two evils'), and the results are the same ad infinitum -- contractor executives get wealthy, rarely are they held accountable for shoddiness in implementation or exceeding the contract price they promised in the bidding process they could keep, and they always look for whatever corners they can cut to lower their actual costs so they can remain the low bidder and still funnel gargantuan amounts of taxpayer dollars to their hands.

"Private" (corporate) entities are interested in one thing:  concentrating wealth in the hands of their executives and already wealthiest shareholders.  Any claims to the contrary (things like 'customer-focused,' 'quality-focused' or the like) are meaningless, unsubstantive sales pitches.  If they were truly customer-, product- or service-focused above their own pay, they would not give themselves a year-over-year raise percentage several times that of their actual production or quality control folk, nor pay their production or quality control folk less than their sales folk.  Placing the greatest monetary focus on salesmen more means squeezing more out of the quality they have instead of focusing on better quality products or services.  This is a small part of the reason why "privatization" diverges from the best interests of the nation and even the economy as a whole.  This has proven to be the case over and over, especially since the U.S. moved from being largely agrarian to industrialist-capitalistic starting around the mid to late 19th century.  Hard lessons were learned early about the tyranny of unchecked capitalistic power, but over time this has become a lost lesson.

on Oct 12, 2013

It's a new system, bugs need to be worked out, let's wait until the dust settles. I hope it works.

on Oct 12, 2013

How in 2013 can a website with an unlimited budget and years of planning fail?

First Omama car was just passed about 3 years ago so I doubt they decided to make a web site years ago. If memory serves me right I think the web site was supposed to be done sometime in 2011

After it was passed, bids went out for web designers or for a better choice of words IT firms to build the site. So that was all in the last three years.

I sure wouldn't say it was an unlimited budget as they took the lowest bidder. I would bet that with little time left anyone took the time to really check out who they awarded the contract to. One of the problems with always taking the lowest bit.

I have been part of bids for $100,000.00 max. On this bit I saw one for $97.000, one for $93,000, and one for $81,000. It was awarded to the low bit and six months later there was all kinds of legal problems. So sometimes taking the lowest bit gets you in trouble but the Government is good for that and also the States, Counties, etc.

You want to take the lowest bid than do your homework and check out the company real good before an award is given.

on Oct 12, 2013

Don't ya just love how some people think if you have a different opinion than they have or vote differently than they you are idiots. Its a good thing they don't have any power to force their beliefs on the rest of us.

on Oct 12, 2013

I think the biggest issue was not enough bandwidth. But that in it's self shows short sightedness. I don't think they thought so many people were going to hit the site at one time. The problem is we will never know the truth about what happened. it will be some big secret. Need to know only lol. 

on Oct 12, 2013

Just chalk it up to another government mess up, they do that a lot you know.

on Oct 13, 2013

I remember when this site was re-done. There were some pretty good glitches. Even now there are glitches now and then here.

on Oct 13, 2013

Chasbo
I remember when this site was re-done.

You mean here....as in 'right here'?

We're proud of our glitches....builds character...

on Oct 13, 2013

Yep. Good old WC glitches. Like the one where it takes forever to load any WC page no matter what you do?

on Oct 13, 2013



Quoting Chasbo, reply 10I remember when this site was re-done.

You mean here....as in 'right here'?

We're proud of our glitches....builds character...

LOL

on Oct 13, 2013

The Republicans really missed a big opportunity to get their one-year delay.  If they had been a little smarter and punted on the whole shutdown stuff, they would have come off as reasonable, and this would have been the big news of the past two weeks.  Then, they probably would have gotten their one-year delay of the mandate.

 

Instead, they really shot themselves in the foot.

 

Personally, I think the failures with healthcare.gov have been underreported, and this is coming from someone who supports the ACA as a net positive despite it being a net negative for me. 

 

 

on Oct 13, 2013

DaveBax
After it was passed, bids went out for web designers

I'm not all that surprised if the Democrats actually worked a bid system for the site. I remember the Iraq war when Democrats like Hillary and others were bellyaching that Bush gave no bid contract to Halliburton.. There were only two companies in the world who could have bid... Halliburton and some French company. Why should we have given the French such a contract when they didn't even lift a finger to help militarily? So I don't find it as astounding that the Obama admin would contract such a site to the Canadians. I would just take a guess that all that info on the lives of Americans such as SS numbers and their entire health history was going to fall in the hands of the Canadians? McAfee has been in the news calling the site a security nightmare. I don't see why Obama doesn't just make a deal to include a year delay of the individual mandate when his website is irrevocably broken anyway. The whole thing is just bizarre. Not nearly as bizarre as spending lots of money to barricade veterans out of their own memorials.

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