back to article A startup could've made a better Obamacare site, says CloudFlare boss

The White House claims its sickly medical insurance portal healthcare.gov is finally finding its feet – but after weeks of stability problems, one web specialist has told The Reg: a startup would have done better. The site is under fire after struggling to stay running as hundreds of thousands of Americans piled in to check …

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  1. dougal83

    Anything driven by politics and a budget tends to get screwed over by the former and if its just driven by money of course it will be smoother. Saying that if there was no money in it then there would be no private entity. Governments are kinda stuck handling the unprofitable market segments making up for the failings of the market. So if the market worked then there would be a very small government, which would be nice.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Hold on...

      You've worked on a project that isn't driven by politics of some kind? Do these exist?

    2. Eddy Ito

      "Governments are kinda stuck handling the unprofitable market segments making up for the failings of the market."

      Don't forget that it tends to be government that makes the market segment unprofitable in the first place.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      This time it was not the politics and the budgets - the insurers

      Last time I talked to someone involved in the project they said that the questionnaire and workflow description for enrollment has grown to ~ 300+ pages with some ungodly number of line items.

      It is not government incompetence, it is not the budget, it is not the outsourcers who killed that idea. It is the insurance lobby driving a truck filled with fertilizer under this thing through the back door.

      They cooperated. Kind'a. Wholeheartedly. Kind'a too. The result of the cooperation was a workflow that _NOBODY_ in the whole world could and would get right. So the numbers of enrolled do not surprise me.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Prince believes that in many ways the Healthcare.gov site has been hampered by the unique demands a government IT project places on a portal that commercial projects rarely face, such as legislative oversight"

    Well, yes. A startup absolutely could not provide a better government healthcare site, for the simple reason of compliance. A government project, in the health sector? What startup has experience of working on the existing systems that'll rely on, the legal knowledge to remain the right side of compliance law, and the security chops to keep it (hopefully) secure (ish) ?

    By that I mean, give me a name of a startup company that exists who can do the above? Those kinds of startups simply don't exist.

    1. Swarthy
      FAIL

      From most reports, they don't exist in the government either (Site launched using HTTP, switched to HTTPS after a few hours; limited/no background checks on the people perusing working with the Personal Information of users; Anybody who understands what measures are needed to remain in compliance with the bill, or even a firm understanding of the regulations of the bill).

  3. Flawless101

    still not sure why governments don't have their own development houses, not that I'm saying that would make every government project fantastic but it gets tiresome to hear about how X many contractors were brought in or Y amounts outsourced to make a frigging website.

    1. Swarthy
      Alert

      There is a very simple explanation for that. Government employees are "Managers". The payscale is set such that from GS-1 to ~GS-8 is entry-level office work/management in training. ~GS-8 thru GS-15 Is Management, with pay based on position and seniority. There is no way of evaluating a GS employee for technical merit, and they cannot (by law) pay a technical person what they are worth. So, they pay the contract companies for the product or service, and the companies pay the technical people a technical pay rate.

      1. Flawless101

        I've actually been on the receiving end of this pay scale crap. Interesting to know why I was.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "still not sure why governments don't have their own development houses".

      In the UK the government did have their own development houses until the early 90s when they started to sell them off to all the usual suspects. The spectacular success of EDS, HP etc. ever since is a glowing testament to this policy.

  4. AJames

    Who's in charge?

    I've been involved in a number of these government-driven projects in my career, and the problem is usually a few wannabee system designers on the government side who produce unrealistic specifications and want the contractors to comply with them. The contractors are happy to do so if their price is met, even when they know that the government spec is unrealistic. Example: the UK side of the North Atlantic air traffic control system that fell over on its first day of operation because there were too many aircraft. The contractor pointed to the capacity spec they were given and the fact that it was exceeded, making them technically blameless. How could a huge development and implementation team not know how many aircraft to expect? They did of course, but the government side set the spec many years earlier, failing to allow for growth, and the contractor saw their job as delivering to that spec.

  5. sisk

    What really makes me mad about the Obamacare site is not that it's had problems staying up (that's to be expected: the ringmaster of the political circus has been AWOL for a good long time, since well before Obama, so the clowns are running everything). My biggest problem is the mountain of cash paid by a government that's broke residing over a nation with a broken economy to a FORIEGN web firm. Where the hell do they get off sending that money to Canada when they could be giving it to one of the hundreds of competent web development firms or thousands of proven good freelancers here in the US and stimulating our own economy? That's the part that pisses me off.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Is it? You're quite xenophobic / racist, aren't you?

      1. sisk

        That, AC, is a pretty brainless accusation. When you've got an economy that's not doing very well you don't take hundreds of millions of dollars from that economy and give it to a different economy. That's just stupid, unless of course you're trying to hurt the economy that's already ailing.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Unless they provide a more competitive quote, and seem like they'd do a better job.

          Then, being a capitalist economy, and not a communist / protectionist economy, you do.

          Make your mind up what you want.

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