The real story with Obamacare IT woes is out-of-control private contractors (CGI)

[phantom power]

My local news last night had a large segment bashing the ACA rollout, including a classic McCain outburst. The two main themes were (of course) (a) govt can't do anything right and (b) oh noez, long lines at the doctor are coming to get you!

Naturally, nobody mentioned that private companies did most of the work on this, because that would fuck up their favorite "govt-is-the-problem" narrative.

Whatever the ultimate benefits of Obamacare, it’s clear that the rollout of its $400m registration system and website has been a disaster. Healthcare.gov was unusable for millions who visited the site on launch day earlier this month, and the glitches reportedly continue. What went wrong?

Of course, the Obama administration is to blame for the botched rollout, but there are other culprits getting less attention – namely, global tech conglomerate CGI, which was responsible for the bulk of the execution, and in general the ability of big corporations to get massive taxpayer-funded contracts without enough accountability.

...

Fortunately, then, there are alternatives to outsourcing public functions to big corporations padding their profits at taxpayers’ collective expense, and it is time we used them.

To this end the Healthcare.gov experience should serve as a wake-up call to President Obama, who, after all, said early in his first term he wanted to rein in the contractor-industrial complex, and to the state governments doling out multi-million dollar contracts. The revelation here is that an overdependence on outsourcing isn’t just risky in terms of national security, extortionate at wartime, or harmful because it expands the ranks of low-wage workers; it’s also messing with our ability to carry out basic government functions at a reasonable cost.

Like many contractors, CGI got an open-ended deal from the government, and costs have ballooned even as performance has been abysmal. The company – the largest tech company in Canada with subsidiaries around the world – was initially awarded a $93.7m contract, but now the potential total value for CGI’s work has reportedly tripled, reaching nearly $292m.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/21/the-real-story-with-obamacare-it-woes-is-out-of-control-private-contractors/

[Myrina]

1. Exact duplicate:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023894789

[Nuclear Unicorn]

2. This is what you get when you decouple profit from performance.

If you leave a pile of money on the desk and tell them to take what they think they need, never hold them accountable and then tell them they can have more money every time they screw up -- you will get this exact result.

Plenty of for-profit developers provide excellent products for for-profit corporations. This sort of mess would never have been tolerated in the real business world. Either the contracting corporation would have held the Scope of Work over the developer's head like a bag of hammers or the developer would have said the goal was too unrealistic.