"Federal health officials have not yet explained why CGI was given the contract or why it was awarded on a sole-source basis."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/some-say-h...
[Edit to add source]
[1] http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Firearms_Registry#Cost...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CGI_Group
Why we'd be committing to using non-US companies to develop US systems... I guess it must happen sometimes, but on something this ... public?
Our nations do have a free trade agreement in place, which on the whole I would say has benefited both sides. Patriotism aside, 'buy American' policies do not help with these partnerships.
You would need to do a lot of handwaving to try to argue that spending more money on "american-made" goods, just so that we can feel better psychologically, is a better use of tax money than, say, cancer research.
I'm not even sure what "american-made" would mean in the context of software, which is produced on a global scale. I guess we would have to use Windows Server for the backend systems (and only those parts of it made in the US), instead of Linux, which has Finnish origins.
Of course, I'm not saying CGI has proven very cost effective.
Heck, push it to all your favorite news outlets. There's no reason why one obscure company should get the contract without viable competitors.
Based on that article, the OP is wrong, the six hundred million is across all contracts, the ACA site which most people are aghast at is just under 60 million of that.
</sarcasm>
It is hard to read/understand that spending breakdown, not sure what each 20-50 million dollar allotment is exactly for:
http://usaspending.gov/explore?tab=By+Prime+Awardee&fiscal_y...
Given how we can see the problem with this as developers, imagine what we don't understand about the 10 to 1 or even 100 to 1 overspending on the military and "defense" budget. Just imagine the TSA and "Homeland Security" waste.
I have a weird role: I work at a company which does tons of Federal contracts, but also has lots of private sector work. I keep my sanity by doing short term consulting with private clients. There are some sharp people working the Federal side, but it really is awful.
Winning a contract is EVERYTHING. It is a writing contest, and you can be sure that the Federal contract officer knows jack shit about the actual fundamentals of the project. The Contract Officer is a paper pusher whose job is to look at the line items in the Request for Proposal, and examine which company's proposal best "hits" each line item. And of course they will select a low bidder, which often is a bid too low for the company to even profit, simply meant to get their foot in the door.
The staffing of these Federal contracts is horrific. You get entire teams of "change management" people. I'm currently assisting on a personnel system for a major military organization. I recently had to witness an entire discussion by the change management team on removing hyphens from a particular term to help the branding. I almost threw up in my mouth.
The people I work with on the Fed contracts, in general, don't touch technology when they leave work. Therefore the only browser they use is IE8 (according to the customer org, it is more secure......) they do nothing outside of J2EE/.NET (usually just one of the two) and they HAVE/WILL never build a website that supports more than 5,000 enterprise users (concurrently).
It is incredibly easy to look like a wizard amongst this bunch, but the experience of the Federal world has made me avoid these projects like the plague. The incentives at the business level (and therefore the high salary jobs) are ALL for winning contracts. Performing well on the work won is just viewed as another cost center.
What are you referring to with "it"? The folks at your company who do federal IT work? Government IT employees? Federal IT consulting?
It's probably just a single contract with milestones that correspond to payments. Like "completed design" means they get 10%.
Its hard to win when you set the goals like this (low), too
The solicitation number he uses to filter the USASpending.gov site is also tied to a larger PECOS contract, and not to Healthcare.gov like he claims.
We're being had guys. This is poor reporting at best, or deliberate obfuscation at worst.
A lot of people are complaining about the cost, even at the $60M-$100M, but I haven't seen anyone explain what costs would be reasonable for something at this scale and with the security + privacy requirements it likely entails.
The total budget for all government websites isn't important (for starters they aren't paid for out of one bucket), it's just important that individually each one is managed competently.
And you know the requirements for the next ten years of computing technology how?
Well here you go - this is the perfect example to share with you as to why most Americans didn't/don't want "Obamacare". We, the voters, have no confidence that the current system+administration+Congress (or previous 10 of each!) could've created a system for "health insurance for all" that worked and was efficient. It's not anything against Obama - it's that we've seen administration after administration try to implement some big, sweeping group/plan for 20+ years and every one of them has turned into an inefficient holy hell of a mess. The most recent example of a major #$%&-up is Homeland Security (which I think is the last major agency created).
If the American public believed that the current government was capable of delivering state sponsored health care in an efficient way, every Democrat and Republican in this country would've voted for it. So don't think of "those who are against Obamacare" as anti-Obama, but rather anti-inefficiency (or anti-bigger government).
We have affordable, universal health care because we've eliminated all forms of waste & corruption from our governments, and are left with a stream-lined, Indy 500 car pit type system.
I don't think so.
Get off it already - America doesn't have a decent health care system because insurance companies pay off corrupt congressmen to make sure you don't have one.
Saying that one of the causes of that is corruption is not exactly refuting the claim.
The vastly more efficient thing to do would be to expand our current socialist single-payer medical system (Medicare) to cover all. However, we live in a country where large financial interests our capable of preserving themselves, irrespective of the value they provide. The health insurance companies ensured that any solution to universal coverage included them, which is an automatically bad thing. They financed ad campaigns to scare the senior citizens into thinking that any expansion of Medicare would mean less care for them. Health insurance companies (in their current role of acting as payment middle men as opposed to a necessary role of covering catastrophic costs) provide no value. They interfere with the free market, and are less efficient than a Canadian style single payer/private provider model.
Anyone who thinks the current system is acceptable has never experienced the current system: they likely are covered by a large company's health insurance company, and haven't had to watch a family member try to buy themselves insurance.
Strange, a large number of us can remember buying individual "major medical" high deductible catastrophic coverage policies for quite reasonable sums of money, since they're true insurance ... policies which are now illegal. And a lot of self-insured people/families are finding their policies canceled or unaffordable, along with what they can in theory buy on the exchanges. Seeing as how Obamacare mandates 10? or so generally? new and expensive things, like coverage of your children till age 26. Or explicitly makes healthcare more expensive, like the 2.3% excise tax on medical devices: http://www.irs.gov/uac/Medical-Device-Excise-Tax:-Frequently...
As for "somebody's doctor taking orders from the government" ... well, what if they want to get reimbursed? Not quite the same thing, but just about the same effect.
As for Medicare ... well, seeing as how much it shifts costs to other customers, just how do you propose to pay for it as more and more people got moved to it? Being disabled, I'm on it, and track what my doctors get paid. Sometimes its reasonable, frequently its not, and I haven't needed anything really expensive yet....
And I do believe your race card has been maxed out: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-august-5-2010/race-car... ; why do you think we've opposed this since Truman made the first attempt? Was Clinton truly our "First Black President" as way too many said before Obama, back when Hillarycare crashed and burned?
I mean, the government is taking control of 1/6 of the nation's economy, why ever did the Obamacare enthusiasts think this would work even vaguely well???
1) when you say "we need to look more at why", the answer is "Because you keep voting this or that yahoo into office and he/she is a career politician whose sole interest is in continuing to please the various lobbyists, PACs, and special interest groups that offer the most perks."
You can then say, "Okay, Scott - how do we solve that then?" I think the logical/easy answer is "Put term limits on Congress". Force the lobbyists/etc to make new relationships every four years. Take things out of the back room and make Congress be part of someone's CV, not their entire CV.
2) Those same "career politicians" are the ones who have sole vote on whether to reform any change in term limits. Term limits have been tried before but failed to get anywhere.[0]
Until you change something with the career politicians of this country, we can't have nice new things.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_limits_in_the_United_State...
http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2011/09/20/medicare-is-more-ef...
sounds like this project is a colossal clusterf*k. Innovation and customer service are not in the government's wheelhouse, and I would certainly rather have market-based systems anywhere they work. It just hasn't worked for health care. And governments provide roads, schools, water etc. And the private sector has its share of disastrous projects, Webvan and Boo.com and Pets.com burning through hundreds of millions and going nowhere.
I sort of wish Google or Elon Musk or somebody would step up and volunteer to fix it, instead of saying, government sucks, people have to keep getting crappy/no health care.
Now Medicare shifts quite a bit of additional costs onto others, you need federal government approval for every new hospital bed, I remember reading some time ago that one state's hospitals were screwed because the state and the federal government had incompatible requirements for hot water temperature, etc. The FDA has massive and politicized control over many system inputs such as drugs and devices, the government has failed to intervene when almost every other country insisted companies sell drugs at near cost (our market supports way more than half the cost of new drug development), etc. etc. etc.
And just before Obamacare was passed the government (mostly Federal with states "partnering" Medicaid) was paying for almost half the nation's healthcare.
A market that was thoroughly intertwingled with governments doesn't really seem up to allowing statements like "It just hasn't worked for health care."
Saying that the new government healthcare system is inefficient and disappointing is not enough to malign it - it has to be equally or more inefficient and ineffective than the system it's replacing.
Just because option A sucks doesn't mean we should prefer option B which we justifiably expect will be (and is rapidly proving to be) much worse.
Oh, BTW: my nontrivial experience with the existing (mostly private) healthcare system is that it works very well, thank you very much, now please keep your hands & laws off it.
edit: Also, the projects I work on are Agile and I get to use other technologies besides .Net framework (e.g. node.js and backbone.js)
You may be correct, but arguing that "because we generally get these contracts, we were an obvious choice" does little to defuse assertions of cronyism.
There are good reasons a government body might want to give a contract to someone they worked with before. There's a previous track record of success, and they know that the company already has expertise/solutions for their specialized requirements (i.e. section 508 compliance).
This is sort of like saying:
Also, a lot of people have mentioned nepotism, which I think is baseless. I've already done work for myuncleisgreat.com and myuncleiscool.com, so when my uncle had to build myunclerules.com, I was an obvious choice.
As for cronyism, who's to say you got those other site honestly?
Not saying you didn't, just that you're not citing any evidence. I can: I'm disabled and therefore on Medicare since 2007, and use medicare.gov to both handle Part D annual prescription plan selection and signup, and to check Part B claims. Aside from companies sometimes lying through their teeth about the costs for various drugs (well, it looks like that), I have no complaints besides the site being a little clunky. It gets the job done and has never shown any signs of buckling under load.
https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov
You can deploy it like any other Jekyll site. The code and content has changed since then but I imagine it still has the same static front facing architecture, much like the Obama campaign fundraising site, which famously raised $250M using Jekyll static pages: http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-millio...
So the number of raw visitors may not be the most relevant number, as many of them may have hit the front page and left, or never got around to the signup part. But what exactly was the technology in the back-end stack?
So if you get elected to "do something" about orphans, you'll create an organization to do something. The goal of this organization is political: appear to be making progress on the orphan problem. At the very least, do not appear in the news as an example of government waste.
The current website problem is a political failure -- it looks bad. But that's just a short term consideration. The long-term bet is that over the next decades, the ACA will bring great political benefit to the political party that supported it, no matter what other things it does.
So when we evaluate projects created by political organizations for political reasons, the success criteria is much different than commercial or non-profit projects. I don't think this is a failure. Maybe a bump in the road, but it's nothing that won't work itself out over the next year or so. (And be long forgotten)
Remember, a lot of government contractors made money building these sites. A lot of people had jobs. A lot of committees and functionaries are able to add this to their list of good they've done in the world. Not being able to actually use the site for a while is a small pittance compared to the real, measured benefit the sites have created. So far. If it drags on for a long time, the political math could switch around the other way, but I doubt it.
So what did they do? They left the problem to future generations to solve. And the result involved a lot of bloodshed.
In any system of government, there's always going to be a strong desire to kick problems down the road for somebody else to solve. I think the best we can hope for is some structures in place to minimize this, but you'll never get rid of it completely.
What we see now is just 250 years or so of this thinking, with the default solution of letting somebody else handle it growing more powerful with each passing year.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/10/08/230424...
that discusses the broader issue of United States federal government contracting for information technology services. Some reforms are suggested in that story that would help more competent startup companies compete against the established federal contractors that win most of the big contracts. The specialized skill that the incumbents bring to the contracting process is not specialized skill in data-processing or programming for federal agencies, but rather specialized skill in navigating the federal bureaucracy for bidding on federal contracts.
I'm not sure what hoops the tax processing sites have to go through, but people are at least as protective of that data as their medical records.
If there are already problems with how federal contracts are awarded, it is hard to imagine that wholesale deregulation is going to result in a more selective process. For example, blind removal of lowest-bidder requirements would make larger-scale corruption even easier.
There are legitimate complaints and federal contracting needs work, but what kind of work? Let's not underestimate how much worse we can make it. The money on the table is ample incentive for people to propose innocent-sounding reforms which really just open up the taps or redirect them to different parties rather than increasing efficiency.
Look at the track record of the company, and use that in factoring in contract awards. Companies that routinely go over budget and over time should be penalized by having a reduced chance of getting contracts in the first place. That's one thing that would help level the playing field a bit.
Of course, what would happen is those larger companies would create related spin-offs that are technically not related, and they'd have 'fresh' stats to compete with, and the cycle would start over again, probably.
Navigating Govermental Bureaucratic Morass as a Service
Their website is now apparently in open beta: https://rfpez.sba.gov/
This article even links directly to some of the code, which A) looks fine? and B) is like “Yeah, the problem wasn’t with procurement regulations or clear requirements or public-private cronyism or managerial competence, it was that damn person who told the computer what to do and the computer didn’t do the right thing.”
> the text on the sign-up page, the front-end javascript validation on the sign-up page, and the text on the help page all have different requirements for valid usernames in the database!
It's always going to be hard to be agile on federal contracts - there're too many customers to really get a clear view from them.
But just as you can find a bug deep in the code, you can also go up the stack and ask how it got there: how were the specs for a valid username defined and published? Where were the tests—or at the very least, QA procedures—that should have encoded and verified those specs? Where were the managers that should have made sure those tests existed? Where were the manager's manager that should have delegated resources to the manager to get those tests written? Where was the manager's manager's manager who knew how to hire someone who would value quality control? Who was on the government procurement panel that did not adequately assess their contractor's ability to deliver quality?
It's titled "Crazzzzzzzy code..."
Or view StackOverflow on multiline text in JavaScript?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/805107/creating-multiline...
My latest complaint: I logged in many times last week to fill in information, a bit at a time before I lost access.
Then starting Sunday morning I could no longer login. On the phone last night I was told that they had wiped all stored passwords and to follow the "I don't remember my password" link. Couldn't they have posted that as a huge banner message and let people know? I had four days of frustration trying to login.
Then, when I got the reset password link, and followed it, one of the profile verification questions they asked for resetting my password WAS A QUESTION THAT I HAD NOT BEEN ASKED so I had no way to answer it. I wrote down my profile questions so I am fairly sure of this. wTF
Just as fucked in terms of passwords being screwed, lockouts, other such nonsense.
Security is almost the same. 'Must be secure!'. Unless they procure and schedule independent penetration testing and code audit (if they even get the code), the vendor is able to deliver insecure code with a horrible UI and still be 100% within the terms of the contract.
The reason government doesn't do more agile is because the politics of the stakeholders can get crazy, with the end result being constantly shifting goal posts and nothing delivered. So they require Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS - give us something that already works), and yet due to the requirements... there's always significant customization required. I wish someone in government understood this : P
I have noticed how shocked people are when they hear how much custom software really costs. I don't know what you do for a living, but here's an example:
A family member hears you make software, ask you if you can create a website for his business for a friendly fee. Sure, you think. After reviewing his requirements, and deducting 50% because he's your uncle and you like him and want his business to do well, you give him a quote: 3 months and $10,000. He nearly gets a heart attack. What had he expected then? Well, a copy of windows costs less than $100. How could it be more than that?
A friend of mine works at the Ministry of Justice, and told me recently he has the easiest job in the world, because even if he were to just sit at his desk and do nothing he'd be delivering a better service than the agencies that proceeded him, and saving the ministry huge amounts of money.
[1] http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/ [2] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/hundreds-of-government-we...
(for comparison, click through to the HMRC list of VAT rates - fairy enough, it has more information, but it's so messy in comparison)
Public Contest -> Manager creates company and submits project -> Manager chooses own company -> Manager quits INEM to 'work' at the new company. This is public knowledge but there isn't much we can do about it
http://usaspending.gov/explore?tab=By+Prime+Awardee&fiscal_y...
This shows the $634M headline number as the amount of contracts paid to CGI Federal over a ~6 year period. It is filtered based on solicitation number HHSM500200700015I.
A little googling returns the following page: https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=f1522d0...
"The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) intends to modify the PECOS contract to
support the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) requiremnts for the
Development, Maintenance and Enhancements of HITECH Registration, Attestation and Inquiry Functionalities.
This work is already on the contract, the modification will incorporate costs for the option years."
A few of the news sites linked below imply that the $634M covers the total number of Medicare and PECOS contracts awarded by HHS to CGI, and that the ACA website cost only $93M, which makes it seem cheap compared to the private sites listed in the Digital Trends article:
http://washingtonexaminer.com/canadian-firm-hired-to-build-t... http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/10/09/3-million-obamacare-w...
Before we all explode in outrage, are we sure that we are reading the details of this correctly?
> the ACA website cost only $93M
What more details do we need? There's much worse going on at the same time than that ridiculous number. But it is totally sufficient in on it's own to be outraged.
Can you provide a more reasonable, informed cost estimate?
They hire the lowest quality engineers (e.g. the cheapest), and then bill them outlandish $/hour to work for government agencies. The project plans are packed with useless stuff, and are designed to exceed initial estimations. They get paid by the hour...
2) Compliance with government regulations costs money. Lots of money. This results in a lot more overhead. It also results in a lot more time to get people up to speed, on site, and going. This is why government contractors keep winning bids - compliance costs are huge barriers to entry.
3) Systems you need to integrate with in government (especially legacy systems) can be a complete pain in the butt. It's more likely you're integrating with some FORTRAN green screen than a nice JSON API. This makes large scale systems integration hard.
That said...the app is still very broken and there is obviously a failure here. Failure to test properly (otherwise poorly written tests), failure to open to competitive bids judging from another comment in this thread, and many other issues.
There is a LOT to be done to improve IT acquisition in government, and many things should have gone right that went wrong for the money spent (Figures I saw were more like $138 Million in other publications), but readers should please consider the organizational barriers and difficulties that exist and then factor it into the cost. It doesn't take the sting away, but it does lessen it a bit.
If it's working now, which is seems to be, what's the problem? (OK, I'll concede that $634M is totally and completely insane. But I'm not convinced by the rest of the "bad code" complaints.)
I've just tried creating yet another count. It's hung up on 'step 3' ('please wait' - modal spinner, assuming it's emailing my email address). 3 minutes spinning so far.
OK - it just got done. Got an email. Clicked the link. Logged in. Pause... Taken to https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/auth/userprofile which is just a white screen.
So... still not working for at least some people.
Anyway, sorry it's not working for you, if you're really trying to get insurance.
To spend this kind of money on sites with these kinds of results is just disgraceful:
"The site is so busted that, as of a couple days ago, the number of people that successfully purchased healthcare through it was in the 'single digits,' according to the Washington Post."
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505269_162-57606633/obamacare-we...
“Very, very few people that we’re aware of have enrolled in the federal exchange,” said one insurance industry official, who like many in the industry, spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for possibly offending the Obama administration. “We are talking single digits.”
So one guy allegedly in the "insurance industry" who won't give his name has said enrollment has been in the single digits. Not overall enrollment mind you, just what this one guy has seen come across his desk.
But that's how this article has been spun. Millions of people! single digit success rate! as reported by "some guy". A sad state of affairs indeed.
Not even the administration's biggest defenders are trying to spin this as a successful launch.
Are you really implying the media as a whole is biased against Obama?
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505269_162-57606633/obamacare-we...
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/poll-rollout-health-exchanges...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/some-say-h...
This.
I could imagine a competitive process, e.g. pay a number of different companies to start producing their solution in parallel. And then at the end of 3 months, pick the one(s) that looks the most promising and pay them to continue with it. It sounds wasteful, but I just don't see a better way, because people seem incapable of judging beforehand which companies are actually capable of providing on their promises.
There's a cruel irony in the procurement process where most of the efforts aimed at reducing cost and risk actually increase both by limiting the number of choices and increasing the pain of switching: when everyone knows it'll take months or years to start over with a new vendor only the most egregious failures will be declared unacceptable. I'd tackle this by giving government managers both more discretion and responsibility: more freedom on how their budgets are spent but audit a percentage of expenses every year to review results and conflicts of interest.
The key part of this would be figuring out a good mechanism to reward savings so someone has an incentive to make long-term good decisions. In some cases that might be things like hiring a solid in-house development team to work on a core function of the agency; in others that might be realizing that a service satisfies the most important needs rather than paying to build a completely custom solution.
Something like these healthcare exchanges should have been put to the market in a from where the revenue is directly tied to the end goal: The successful purchase of health insurance by customers (or whatever is the case here, I'm not intimately familiar with the mechanics). Have providers bid on the full thing by revenue pr. successful transaction + an SLA that deducts an appropriate penalty if it isn't met.
Ideally, you don't even need to pick a winner, you can just say that any provider that successfully operates such a marketplace will get the revenue per transaction and let the market sort it out. End users will gravitate towards the sites that are fast and easy to use, "Consumer Reports" will test them etc. Lean, agile shops will win. Clunky, well-connected, but technically unsophisticated government contractors will fail.
I should note that the project I'm on did use this approach, but having picked winners it then proceeded to monkey with the teams constantly and generally screw everything up anyway.
Would we judge competing projects by kLOC? By percentage of code coverage? By extensibility of architecture? By percentage of GUI widgets already laid yout (even if just mocked up)? Or perhaps by conformance to an arbitrary test suite -- which raises the good old `Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?' problem?
Now the risk management is no longer being done by government, but by the banks who lend you the money. They specialise in such work. This a similar dynamic to film financing.
Imagine the secondary market that would pop up for the risk underlying such projects.
* hire really smart people with up-to-date views on technology [1] * build on, and release new open source [2]
[1] https://www.gov.uk/designprinciples [2] https://github.com/alphagov
I'm seeing a system that contains a complete list of government contractors/sub-contractors (this actually exists today). For each company, a list of verified skills (a proven track record) would allow a procurement agent to narrow the field, and a reputation system that let's the cream rise to the top.
I'm not sure it would be feasible to track the employees that make up a company as that's pretty fluid (on the time-scale of government contracts), but in the software field, you could (for instance) sum the reputation of the company's developers stack-overflow profiles.
Obviously, a lot more thought is required!
Also I am really looking forwards to the day I can't get my kid seen by a doctor because there was a budget fight and the government shut down.
The new system acts as a facilitator for people to purchase insurance on an open "exchange" market. The government has as much to do with what happens afterwards as the NYSE has to do with how my 80 shares of Exxon perform. If the stock goes down, I can surely blame the Exxon board, or an oil spill.... but it certainly has nothing to do with the NYSE.
You should read about a law before you talk about it.
Then I can't even choose a plan I want since the goverment mandates levels of coverage.
Please take your blinders off your enabling your party to do horrible things.
The so called obamacare is mainly about access to healthcare. To the people that are left out. Also it is a Republican creation from the early 90s, when the people from the right were actually trying to devise policies rooted in reality with a chance to work.
What it does is actually increase the power of the free market by forcing everyone to trade their goods out in the open transparently.
There is no government control or rationing.
Do you not think that doctors would be one of the essential personal not effected by a shutdown?
And do you seriously believe the US would completely ban private medical care? We have the NHS (free health care for everyone) but we also still have privatised care which you can choose to pay for if you want. It's 2013 and the US still doesn't provide free health care for its citizens. Pigs will fly before they not only do that, but ban private care.
ETA:
> And when things still go wrong, they simply throw “more money at the same people who caused the problem to fix the problem."
For that much money, I could be a terrible web developer.
Meanwhile Freelancer's Union site was great: http://freelancersunion.org/
I got a quote easily before I had to do any quizzes. The gov ones were not like that. There were a few documents that had to be emailed in for verification, but they took care of that promptly. There was one bug related to zip+4 not being supported and not being changeable after entering, but they answered the phone immediately and fixed it in a minute.
I wonder how the political climate might shift if the threat of a de facto 'Annonymous veto' became something that policy makers actually had to worry about. On the up shot, it might finally force law makers to gain a responsible level of internet literacy...
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2013/07/government-gives-cont...
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2013/07/obama-administration-...
> Access Denied > You don't have permission to access "http://nystateofhealth.ny.gov/" on this server.
Why would the top level of such a site have permissions at all?
I just signed up and had no problems.
I get a message saying my login credentials are incorrect. I hit the forgot password link and enter in my username. It finds my account and sends me a password reset email. I click on the link in the password reset email and it takes me back to healthcare.gov with an error message that my account can't be found, which obviously makes no sense because they just used my account to send me an email.
Live Chat has provided zero help, only stating that it's probably a performance issue and to try back later.
One odd thing is that the registration page says you a need a lower case and upper case character, a number and at least one symbol from a pre-defined set. To my knowledge, I didn't use an uppercase character, nor do I use one when do the password reset, which properly sends me an email. I feel like maybe the login portion is properly validating the username requirements, but the registration didn't which is what has left me in this mess.
Sorry, this site isn't worth $600 million.
It has a nice graphic that takes up two thirds of the page while giving no significant information.
What could possibly be wrong with that? That's what most modern landing pages are doing, after all.
https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/registra...
Seems like I can remember several very public commercial blow-ups.
Generally I have had nicer experience with most sites developed under Obama administration like wh.gov and such.
People are so outraged that they call up their senator and demand...what?
The only thing people will demand is that the website gets fixed ASAP, because they were looking for some affordable healthcare options.
Are you all offering to design and build it 6 months in PHP for $50k ?