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Comment by bhauer | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

No it's not "right wing spin". The bigger number is total awards to CGI as a company and the $94M is what they got for doing their part of the healthcare system. People are just confusing the two.

It absolutely is right wing spin. Yes, the bigger number is the total awards to CGI. But the story being pushed by the right wing is "we spent $650M for a website that doesn't work", which has confused a lot of people.

$94M for a website is absurd, and reeks of incompetence and bureaucracy.

$650M for a website would be downright fraudulent. It's not a coincidence that it's the latter number that's being talked about.

In the big picture of the mess of the ACA from the bill writing to passage by way of reconciliation, push back of the states, twisted supreme court logic, the president deciding illegally what parts of the law to implement, and now this states' and federal IT debacle, I find someone getting dollar figure wrong as to how much the website frontend cost to be of no consequence.

Your attempt to silence debate by shaming those you disagree with has been noted.

ACA was passed under regular order.

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.

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.

I didn't suggest $94M for 50 people. I suggested $10M for 50 people for one year.

Like I said, I'm not following this very closely, so thank you for the tip that $650M is not accurate. Doing a Google search, the first article I found confirmed the $93M figure. And it was from Fox News of all places. So I'm not sure if the $650M thing is right-wing spin so much as confusion.

In any event, I still think that's 100x the actual value of the web site work. The site strikes me as the kind of thing a decent consulting company could execute for just shy of $1M.

My point earlier, though, still stands. It's surprising to me that the "best" firm at navigating our regulatory maze is Canadian. A credit to them, I suppose.

If the Canadian part bothers you (it bothers me too) note that we have been giving them millions for years since they also developed the online part of medicare.

But you should note, the STATE run systems, are not built by the same canadian company.

Only the states that decided they weren't going to run their own exchanges and refuse federal funds to help people who need healthcare caused the federal system to be created.

Apparently New York and California developed pretty good enrollment systems of their own.

The federal system was only supposed to be a fallback, but it because a primary because of mostly right-wing run states.

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