Serious question... where does all that money go? Are a few people personally making many millions off this deal? Or are there really hundreds or thousands of employees working on it? Or is it getting subcontracted out many times with each layer taking a slice?
Of course it's over budget. Once you get past the $100 million mark for a web app, your estimation skills start breaking down a bit. But it's good when you have a client who can print money and the private players in the DOD as inspiration. Why not go over budget? You aren't doing a government contract right unless you are going way over budget.<p>I would love to send out an invoice for over $100 million. Even better would be to pick up the phone and tell the government that you are burning through the cash and you will need another $100 million to keep going. Who is their senior developer? Kobe Bryant? Their development team? The L.A. Lakers? "Sorry, Kobe is refusing to write another line of code until we renew his contract."
RTFA everyone.<p>The website cost $93.7m. The rest of the money went to infrastructure, call centre, collection services and building out the state based exchanges.
This very same article was on the front page all day today.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6526761" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6526761</a><p>HealthCare.gov cost $93.7 million, which is still outrageous.
"the bulk of which ($88 million) went to CGI Federal, the company awarded a $93.7 million contract to build Healthcare.gov and other technology portions of the FFEs"<p>What are the "other technology portions".<p>If part of the other technology is building the infrastructure to allow hundreds of insurance companies to access very sensitive data from millions of customers, then that number seems a lot more reasonable.
That's a drop in the bucket when you compare it to the 1.4 trillion spent funding the ~12 year war on terror.<p>What I'm saying is I'd much rather see the money spent on healthcare.
There's a 5,534 line file (dummyData.js) and a 6000+ line (register.js) file, un-minified, with with global functions currently on the site. I would be fired for putting this sort of thing into production. For the $, there's no excuse for this.<p><a href="https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/js/ee/dummyData.js" rel="nofollow">https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/js/ee/du...</a>
<a href="https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/registration.js" rel="nofollow">https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/registra...</a>
Think of the company you could build - build one federal website for all of your seed, A, B, and C rounds of funding in one bundle, with no equity loss.
$500 million and it still has scheduled maintenance:<p><a href="https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/registration" rel="nofollow">https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/registra...</a>
The irony is the CTO of the US Todd Park founded two Health IT companies. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Park" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Park</a>
A bit too meta maybe, but that's a great headline.<p>Because who the hell is getting that commission? Where are the people making this magical money?