Here’s what HealthCare.gov and the F-35 have in common

[unhappycamper]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/25/heres-what-healthcare-gov-and-the-f-35-have-in-common/



Here’s what HealthCare.gov and the F-35 have in common
By Lydia DePillis, Published: October 25 at 12:51 pm

If you think of the most high-profile federal procurement debacles in recent memory, two things come to mind: the wildly over-budget F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program and now HealthCare.gov.

The differences between them, of course, are obvious. The health-care Web site's cost is microscopic compared with the scale of the F-35, which has already cost $87.5 billion and is expected to need another $12.6 billion annually until 2037. You could pay for the entire HealthCare.gov procurement process with the cost of two planes. With the F-35, there is a clear lead contractor in Lockheed Martin; it's hard for the company to avoid blame as have the several contractors involved in building the health-care site. A completely virtual product like a Web site requires different development processes than does a physical product with high capital costs, like an airplane.

Perhaps the most fundamental difference is deadlines: HealthCare.gov had a hard date when it was expected to be fully operational, while the F-35 program has dragged on for a decade longer than planned because the military had other systems it could use (even if it cost more to extend their lifespans).

~snip~

CGI Federal got its piece of the HealthCare.gov contract on an "indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity" basis, which allowed the contract to balloon from about $94 million to $196 million. Lockheed Martin's arrangements with the Pentagon are much more complicated, but the company has shown little regard for frugality, and it took the military a decade to impose any meaningful cost controls (which have finally started to bring the price of planes down).

[Scuba]

1. And only one of these programs actually makes us safer.

And it's not the one with the airplane that doesn't work.