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Comment by finkin1 | Hacker News Reader

According to Wikipedia:

"The original budget for CGI was $93.7 million, but this grew to $292 million prior to launch of the website. While estimates that the overall cost for building the website had reached over $500 million prior to launch, the Office of Inspector General released a report finding that the total cost of the HealthCare.gov website had reached $1.7 billion."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov

Here's the report claiming $1.7B total cost: https://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/oei-03-14-00231.asp

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Of course facebook spends 20 billion a year and can't keep it's shit together either.

Maybe people should stop thinking software is cheap.

“but my 15 year old cousin can make websites!”

Facebook handles hundreds of millions of users per day. Including images and movies. Facebook’s problems are rarely technical. Healthcare.gov is essentially a CRUD app.

I’m sure Healthcare.gov contractors had a lot more bureaucracy and protocols they had to follow—especially security—regarding a project of this magnitude than a cubicle engineer at FB. Granted, the original launch was botched, trying to compare the two is apples and oranges.

FB needs good data and good security so that they can sell what they collect. If it could be obtained from FB without paying them, they wouldn’t last very long.

I guess I need to get in the business of making websites for the government.

Absolutely, however the market is heavily taken by friends and families of politicans in charge. Thats why they can shit out a jquery website done by indians and charge government half a billion dollar without single person being accused for this crime in bright day.

Of course CGI is better than ever! Working on multitude of “successful” government projects ;)

I don't know what's more disturbing... The lazy, nihilistic stereotype of politicians as corrupt, or your casual assumption that everybody would share your racist reflex to equate "indian" with "low quality".

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