Healthcare.gov uses licensed code without license, and more!

[TimothyC]

Obamacare Website Violates Licensing Agreement for Copyrighted Software
Company to pursue action against HHS for using copyrighted web script.

Healthcare.gov, the federal government's Obamacare website, has been under heavy criticism from friend and foe alike during its first two weeks of open enrollment. Repeated errors and delays have prevented many users from even establishing an account, and outside web designers have roundly panned the structure and coding of the site as amateurish and sloppy. The latest indication of the haphazard way in which Healthcare.gov was developed is the uncredited use of a copyrighted web script for a data function used by the site, a violation of the licensing agreement for the software.

The script in question is called DataTables, a very long and complex piece of website software used for formatting and presenting data. DataTables was developed by a British company called SpryMedia which licenses the open-source software freely to anyone who complies with the licensing agreement. A note at the bottom of the DataTables.net website says: "DataTables designed and created by SpryMedia © 2008-2013." The company explains the license for using the software on that website [emphasis added]: DataTables is free, open source software that you can download and use for whatever purpose you wish, on any and as many sites you want. It is free for you to use! DataTables is available under two licenses: GPL v2 license or a BSD (3-point) license, with which you must comply (to do this, basically keep the copyright notices in the software).

The software, a version of which is available at DataTables.net, contains the copyright notice in the opening lines of the code:


At the Healthcare.gov website, however, the opening lines of the script appear as follows, with the copyright and all references to the author and SpryMedia deleted; a search of the entire script does not turn up the missing lines either:


Even a cursory comparison of the two scripts removes any doubt that the source for the script used at Healthcare.gov is indeed the SpryMedia script. The Healthcare.gov version even retained easily identifiable comments by the script's author, such as the following:

Here is a screen capture from the SpryMedia script:


Here is the same section at Healthcare.gov:


THE WEEKLY STANDARD contacted SpryMedia for comment. A representative for the company said that they were "extremely disappointed" to see the copyright information missing and will be pursuing it further with the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that runs the Healthcare.gov site.

The Government spent over $700 million on this, and this is the crap we get? All hail government IT projects!

And it gets worse!

Tech experts: Health exchange site needs total overhaul

WASHINGTON — The federal health care exchange was built using 10-year-old technology that may require constant fixes and updates for the next six months and the eventual overhaul of the entire system, technology experts told USA TODAY.

The site could be perfect, but if the systems from which it draws data are not up to speed, it doesn't matter, said John Engates, chief technology officer at Rackspace, a cloud computer service provider.

"It is a core problem in the sense of it's fundamental to this thing actually working, but it's not necessarily a problem that the people who wrote HealthCare.gov can get to," Engates said. "Even if they had a perfect system, it still won't work."

Recent changes have made the exchanges easier to use, but they still require clearing the computer's cache several times, stopping a pop-up blocker, talking to people via Web chat who suggest waiting until the server is not busy, opening links in new windows and clicking on every available possibility on a page in the hopes of not receiving an error message. With those changes, it took one hour to navigate the HealthCare.gov enrollment process Wednesday.

Those steps shouldn't be necessary, experts said.

"I have never seen a website — in the last five years — require you to delete the cache in an effort to resolve errors," said Dan Schuyler, a director at Leavitt Partners, a health care group by former Health and Human Services secretary Mike Leavitt. "This is a very early Web 1.0 type of fix."

"The application could be fundamentally flawed," said Jeff Kim, president of CDNetworks, a content-delivery network. "They may be using 1990s technology in 2.0 world."

Outsiders acknowledged they can't see the whole system, but they said they feared HHS built a system that will need an expensive overhaul that would cause more headaches for people trying to buy insurance.

"I will be the first to tell you that the website launch was rockier than we wanted it to be,'' HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Wednesday at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College, adding that people have until Dec. 15 to enroll to ensure coverage beginning Jan. 1.

HHS officials did not respond to a request about the nature of the problems. However, they reiterated that wait times have been reduced or even eliminated as they continue to work to fix the system. As of Thursday, the site had received 17 million unique visitors.

"We continue to work around the clock to improve the consumer experience on HealthCare.gov," HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters said. "We are seeing progress: wait times to begin the online process have been virtually eliminated, and more consumers are creating accounts, completing applications and ultimately enrolling in coverage if they choose to do so at this time. However, we will not stop addressing issues and improving the system until the doors to HealthCare.gov are wide open."

Engates said HHS has been opaque about the problems, and the tech industry doesn't know the extent of the issues. "There's no secrets leaking out," he said. "I'm sure everyone's looking for something to change the direction of the conversation, but it's just not there."

"I think it's a data problem," Kim said. "It always comes down to that."

And if that's the case, the problems are beyond "rocky," he said. Instead, it would require a "fundamental re-architecture." In the meantime, "I think they're just trying to shore up as quickly as possible. They don't have time to start from scratch."

"If I was them, and I'm just conjecturing, I would probably come up with some manual way of saying, 'Only people with the last name starting with 'A' can sign up today," he said.

But come March 31, when the first enrollment period ends, the "shore up" period may become a "re-architecting" period, Kim said.

On a good note, he said, after looking at available code, the site is "very secure."

Clearing the cache, which has helped make it easier for some people to enroll, could ultimately strain the system more, Kim said. That's because a "cookie" is stored on a person's computer that contains data, such as the person's name and address, that can then be quickly accessed when that person gets on the website again instead of having to be retrieved from the government's server.

But as HHS fixes errors, the cookies may not correspond with the updated website, so rather than allowing someone to quickly log in, they instead cause an error message. And every time a person clears his computer's cache, the government's website has to work that much harder to grab more data.

Requiring people who may not be Web savvy to use the site in any way other than a step-by-step easy process defeats the point of the whole system, Schuyler said. That includes laws mandating that insurers provide clear explanations about policies to people may make sound decisions and understand what they're buying.

"Most consumers will have no idea what 'clearing the cache' is and this will just cause more confusion and frustration," he said.

So far, the site's problems have not driven away potential customers, according to a poll conducted by uSamp — United Sample Inc. The survey found that among the 832 people who attempted to log in, 38% received an error message, 50% were asked to try again later, 25% were unable to create an account, 31% were told the system was down, and 19% had no problems. About 83% said they would try again later, while 15% said they would wait until they heard the website was working well. About 70% of those who said they had no issues said they still waited to enroll because they want to think about their options.

Engates said he believes most of the problems are caused by systems integration with other sites, such as the IRS. And that could be causing some of the problems people see as they make it past the initial application process. It's a series of questions meant to verify a person's identity and income. But after that questionnaire, visitors often encounter a series of error messages, or the page a person tries to click to doesn't come up. The data requests to other sites could be causing those problems, Engates said, which would mean the problem isn't with the HHS site itself.

"Maybe the site is submitting a request for more data, and that puts you in that trap again," he said. "It's a giant integration problem that they have to solve."

And as they try to fix those problems, there's another issue lurking in the background: Some HHS personnel were named essential, and not subject to furloughs because of the government shutdown. But that didn't apply to the other organizations they were working with, Engates said. So as HHS techs work around the clock to fix the problems, IRS techs may be prohibited from working at all.

In the meantime, HHS personnel can't say anything about the situation, it can be played politically as "bad," he said. If they say it will take two weeks to fix, they will be criticized because it's taking too long. But he expects that it's a problem that will be resolved soon, especially as the volume of visitors goes down.

"If you can get the system below some sort of threshold, it will perform as it's supposed to," Engates said. "It won't get any worse. It's going to get better little by little by little."

At this point we should have just hired Amazon to run the damn thing.

[Lord MJ]

The inevitable result of government contracting and procurement policies, designed to prevent corruption but succeeding in only the lowest bidder or the companies most skilled at navigating the government contracting process.

If the Obama campaign people built this site instead of the myriad of contracting firms that built this, it would be much better off. I noticed a while back in another article about this, that the portions built by a media startup, actually were stellar, but the portions built by the big corporate America firms are where the problems lie.

And even with the big firms, I know from personal experience that they can provide good work, but in many cases the contracting agency is more interested in filling staff billets rather than contracting with the company to provide a service. I've been in quite a few situations, where my employer was hired by an agency to fill seats rather than them contracting with our company to provide this service, or to solve this problem, etc.

If you want to eliminate bloat and inefficiency in government, and reduce spending and lower the deficit, then reforming the procurement regulations would actually be something worthwhile and productive.

[Lord MJ]

Would like to see a break down of the $700 mil though. I imagine a lot of that would be the Enterprise systems in the backend that the user doesn't even see, rather than the parts that are most visible and that the user actually interfaces with.

That portion seems to be the the least expensive to implement based on my experience as a web developer, but the Enterprise systems can easily add up in cost, especially when you take audits and testing into consideration.

BTW, I've used datatables before. I imagine the firm that used that library, stripped out the copyright, for some reason.

[TimothyC]

Health Website Woes Widen as Insurers Get Wrong Data

Insurers say the federal health-care marketplace is generating flawed data that is straining their ability to handle even the trickle of enrollees who have gotten through so far, in a sign that technological problems extend further than the website traffic and software issues already identified.

Emerging errors include duplicate enrollments, spouses reported as children, missing data fields and suspect eligibility determinations, say executives at more than a dozen health plans. Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Nebraska said it had to hire temporary workers to contact new customers directly to resolve inaccuracies in submissions. Medical Mutual of Ohio said one customer had successfully signed up for three of its plans.

The flaws could do lasting damage to the law if customers are deterred from signing up or mistakenly believe they have obtained coverage.

"The longer this takes to resolve…the harder it will be to get people to [come back and] sign up," said Aetna Inc. Chief Executive Mark Bertolini. "It's not off to a great start," he said, though he believes the marketplaces are "here to stay."

The new troubles for the Affordable Care Act arrive as Washington's attention is expected to sharply shift toward scrutiny of the site's rocky rollout, whose problems had been overshadowed by a two-week brawl over the government shutdown and debt ceiling.

Pressure is rising on the Obama administration to fix the problems. A number of Republicans have urged Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, to resign. Prominent Democrats, including House Ways and Means ranking member Rep. Sander Levin (D., Mich.), have called for fixes to be accelerated. The White House has said it has full confidence in Ms. Sebelius.

HHS, which is running all or part of the marketplaces in 36 states, has repeatedly declined to answer specific questions about its handling of the rollout, including specific glitches, enrollment figures, or its plans to fix the problems.

"We know that people are enrolling in coverage and the system works. As individual problems are raised by insurers, we work aggressively to address them," HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters said Thursday.

Health-department officials have pressured insurers to refrain from commenting publicly about the problems, according to executives at four health plans, who asked not to be named. The HHS declined to comment.

In prolonging the battles over the budget and debt ceiling, "all Republicans did was give [President Obama] great cover for the complete screw-up on the opening of the exchanges," said Gail Wilensky, a Medicare director in the administration of George H.W. Bush and UnitedHealth Group Inc. board member.

But the persistence of the technological problems could force a steeper political price for the Obama administration as Republican lawmakers redirect their focus. The GOP-led House Energy and Commerce Committee announced Thursday night it would hold a hearing next week on the rollout of the law and called on HHS to "voluntarily" make officials available after the secretary's staff said she couldn't come. Ms Peters, the HHS spokeswoman, said the department intended to be "responsive" to the request.

Under the law, most Americans would have to buy coverage starting next year, or pay a fine.

Supporters of the law said they were frustrated by the lack of answers from the administration. "I wish they would explain what the technical problems are and how they intend to fix them," said Timothy Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University and a longtime defender of the overhaul.

The latest round of problems has emerged after a technical bottleneck that blocked many potential customers from accessing the marketplace began to clear this week. People familiar with the development of the exchange said some technical problems improved this week.

Of 209,000 users who began to register on healthcare.gov on Monday or Tuesday of this week, just over one-quarter finished the process, according to an estimate made by the analytics firm comScore for The Wall Street Journal. In the first week, only 10% did so. The estimates are based on a sampling of Internet users tracked by the company.

As more of those users attempted to sign up for plans this week, insurers began noticing problems with enrollment data. For now, they say they are largely able to manually correct the errors. But as enrollment increases—up to 7 million consumers are expected to sign up in the next 5½ months—that may not be possible, they worry.

Scott & White Health Plan in Temple, Texas, has received 25 enrollees from the federally run exchange so far. "There are some missing data elements that are requiring a lot of research on our part," said Allan Einboden, the health plan's chief executive. "If we'd received 5,000 and they all had to be worked, that's a lot of extra administrative costs," said Mr. Einboden, who said he expects the problems to be fixed.

After realizing that some applications listed up to three spouses in a single family, Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Nebraska, which has about 50 health-law enrollees, had to "stop those enrollments from going through the automated process," said Matt Leonard, the insurer's sales manager. "It takes an automated process and turns it into a manual process," he said.

At Priority Health in Michigan, health-plan staff are calling new customers to confirm each of their "couple of dozen" enrollees accurately picked the plan, said Joan Budden, chief marketing officer, after realizing some had enrolled in multiple health plans, likely owing to user error linked to slow healthcare.gov response times. "Sometimes they pushed the [submit] button three times," Ms. Budden said.

Sioux Falls, S.D.,-based Avera Health Plans has called each of its 21 incoming customers to make sure the data are correct. As consumers struggle to navigate healthcare.gov, some health-plan executives worry that only the sickest—those who most expect to need insurance—will persist in seeking coverage. If younger consumers who are on the fence about buying coverage find the process too onerous, insurers may end up with too few healthier members to offset the costs of less-healthy enrollees.

Tara Seidenberg, a 48-year-old paralegal from suburban Houston with multiple sclerosis, says she is likely to put up with all kinds of hurdles to buy coverage. After days of failed attempts to sign up on healthcare.gov, she is taking a break to wait for the glitches to resolve. She takes medications that cost $4,600 a month and her current coverage won't be available next year. "I'm pretty much guaranteed to try it again," Ms. Seidenberg said.
Timothy W. Martin and Joel Schectman contributed to this article.

So not only is the front end in violation of copyright law, the back end is so screwed up it's not working. Isn't the exchange not working the reason why the employer mandate was pushed back a year?

[Wicked Pilot]

Not sure pushing the exchanges back a year would have resulted in a different outcome. If I had a nickel for every time DOD came out with a new large scale complex system like DTS or GDSS2 that initially caused asspains for everyone involved, well I wouldn't be asking United for a job next week.

[Knife]

Can't help but think that if there wasn't two years of 'If the GOPers win congress they'll sink Obama care so why put forth too much effort into making it work' and 'if the GOPers win the POTUS they'll scrap the Obama care so why put effort into making it work' and 'If the GOPers shut down the government to defund Obama care, then why put forth the effort to make it work' may have affected the program in it's launch.

Are there problems? Hell yes. Then again, with millions trying to log on and get health care, it only reinforces the fact that this is needed, so instead of crying, lets fix the damn thing so it works.

[Napoleon the Clown]

But that's haaaard. And when something the government does is flawed, it's a sign the government is bad and should stay out of it. When online activation for a video game causes servers to get swamped it isn't a sign of online activation being bad, though! (Not always online, just activation)


Just let Tim pretend that this is the worst thing ever. There's no way to sway him. We could have 45 million new people get insurance and he'd complain about how the bronze plans have high deductibles.

[Alferd Packer]

High-profile websites shouldn't swipe licensed code. After all, that's what Orrin Hatch's web developers did back in the day, and who wants to be associated in any way with Orrin Hatch?

As for the site working terribly, I'm not suprised. They probably did a shit job of making sure the code was scalable, and had no plan in place for quickly adding capacity in the event that demand exceeded their expectations. I'm actually not terribly concerned about the backend stuff; as long as you can collect the data, you can always clean up the data per each insurer's formatting requirements and send it out properly later. The real kicker is the fact that it's tough to use the damn site in the first place.

[Wicked Pilot]

Can't help but think that if there wasn't two years of 'If the GOPers win congress they'll sink Obama care so why put forth too much effort into making it work' and 'if the GOPers win the POTUS they'll scrap the Obama care so why put effort into making it work' and 'If the GOPers shut down the government to defund Obama care, then why put forth the effort to make it work' may have affected the program in it's launch.

Never mind the fact that these exchanges were suppose to be run by states. From what I've heard the systems in places like California and Colorado and doing much better. My current state, Florida, and our scrotum sucking governor Rick Scott decided like so many others to shirk their responsibilities and are now blaming the fed. And he came to the governor's office from the healthcare industry, he could have personally oversaw the creation of the best exchange in the country. But no it's Florida, our state motto is 'make it suck more please.'

[LapsedPacifist]

Here's the link to just see what rates are offered for various plans on Healthcare.gov. It was kind of a PITA to find, but when people complain about huge premiums it's nice to be able to see if they know what they're talking about.

https://www.healthcare.gov/find-premium-estimates/

[TimothyC]

Can't help but think that if there wasn't two years of 'If the GOPers win congress they'll sink Obama care so why put forth too much effort into making it work' and 'if the GOPers win the POTUS they'll scrap the Obama care so why put effort into making it work' and 'If the GOPers shut down the government to defund Obama care, then why put forth the effort to make it work' may have affected the program in it's launch.

Ah! So it's republican instringence that has caused the project to be fail-tastic? Fascinating. I would have guessed that the blame would go on the contractor, the people who oversaw the contractor, or the people who wrote the contract/awarded the contract in the first place. Fundamentally, if they (the contractors & the people overseeing the bids/contract execution) didn't do their job correctly, the contractors should be fired, barred from bidding again, and fined until we recoup the costs. There should be a two way street - people should expect the government does it's job right, and the government shouldn't tolerate shoddy work.

Never mind the fact that these exchanges were suppose to be run by states. From what I've heard the systems in places like California and Colorado and doing much better.

I thought some of the savings was to come from getting everyone in the largest insurance pool possible? Now you are saying that states, with smaller budgets can get this to work? If they can, why are the feds having so much trouble?

Here's the link to just see what rates are offered for various plans on Healthcare.gov. It was kind of a PITA to find, but when people complain about huge premiums it's nice to be able to see if they know what they're talking about.

The stories that we're hearing so far are situations where people near the assistance margins ( ~$46k for singles, ~$62k for couples, ~$78k for trios, ect) who get significant federal assistance if they fall under the income cap for assistance, but get hit with costs that are higher than the increase in income. In short, for these (often older) people, we are disincentivizing work, and that's generally not a good thing.

[Knife]

Can't help but think that if there wasn't two years of 'If the GOPers win congress they'll sink Obama care so why put forth too much effort into making it work' and 'if the GOPers win the POTUS they'll scrap the Obama care so why put effort into making it work' and 'If the GOPers shut down the government to defund Obama care, then why put forth the effort to make it work' may have affected the program in it's launch.

Ah! So it's republican instringence that has caused the project to be fail-tastic? Fascinating. I would have guessed that the blame would go on the contractor, the people who oversaw the contractor, or the people who wrote the contract/awarded the contract in the first place. Fundamentally, if they (the contractors & the people overseeing the bids/contract execution) didn't do their job correctly, the contractors should be fired, barred from bidding again, and fined until we recoup the costs. There should be a two way street - people should expect the government does it's job right, and the government shouldn't tolerate shoddy work.

Why should anyone expect a product to be perfect when it's whole development has been marred with the notion that it'll die before it comes out? You say: "Obama care is a fail because the website crashes/doesn't work right when it opened." I say, "Hey look, so many people want affordable health care plans it's overloaded the website." As for the code, meh, not my area of expertise. If the license holder wants to sue, let em.

[Prannon]

I work for a web hosting company. Our development department comes out with new code or new software that works half the time or is released unready and gets iron'd out later. This sort of stuff is normal. Cry me a fucking river.

[TimothyC]

Why should anyone expect a product to be perfect when it's whole development has been marred with the notion that it'll die before it comes out? You say: "Obama care is a fail because the website crashes/doesn't work right when it opened." I say, "Hey look, so many people want affordable health care plans it's overloaded the website." As for the code, meh, not my area of expertise. If the license holder wants to sue, let em.

I expect the product to work. I expect people to do their jobs as they are contracted to do them. If you think the risk of major IT projects being scrapped isn't something that impacts the private side, you are sadly mistaken. I especially expect the system to work when it costs 5-10 times the originally budgeted amount.

I work for a web hosting company. Our development department comes out with new code or new software that works half the time or is released unready and gets iron'd out later. This sort of stuff is normal. Cry me a fucking river.

Do the systems you deploy also come with a "Use this or you'll have to pay a tax" mission? I don't expect perfection, but I expect something better than flipping spouses and children, or using unlicensed code. I think we can all get behind the idea that those who work for the government have a responsibility to the public to do the best damn job they can - and what we've got now doesn't look like that.

[Lord MJ]

Do the systems you deploy also come with a "Use this or you'll have to pay a tax" mission?

To be fair, there is no "Use this website or you'll have to pay a tax" requirement. The requirement is that (in general) all Americans must have some kind of health coverage, whether it be via their employer, purchased on their own, purchased via a state exchange, purchased via healthcare.gov, provided via state provided health coverage (in the small few states that actually do that), or anywhere else.

The online exchanges are intended to make it easier to find health insurance plans, compare them, and then purchase them. Even with the glitches, people have a greater ability to do that now than they did before the exchange went live.

As far as the glitches though, lets be clear, some of these are the inevitable symptoms of any large Enterprise roll out. Other ones are undoubtedly the result of sloppy work. In which case complaints are perfectly legitimate. And both supporters and opposers of the ACA law can legitimately complain about the glitches in the website.

My problem is that opposers of the ACA are trying to use the glitches as part of a political crusade to score points against the ACA law. And the congressional hearings called up (like most congressional hearings) are little more than tactics to score points.

[Napoleon the Clown]

MJ said what I think, pretty much.

String up the contractors for doing shit work. They should have been watched more closely, but then what would that have done to the budget? Using contractors drives up costs simply because you've got a middleman all of a sudden and you've gotta spend money making sure they do their job right.

But at least the private sector sees more jobs, ami­rite?

[TronPaul]

In terms of development you wouldn't ask the CEO of where I work about bugs, and I wouldn't expect Obama or even the head of the HHS to be able to directly impact the speed of bug fixes or the quality of code. If you're living in the real world you realize that no one can write perfect code and that bugs will happen. Just because this is managed by the government doesn't mean they will magically be able to ship without bugs. Real people wrote the app, and they certainly aren't paid as much as the people working at Amazon and Google. Right now I'm guessing they're prioritizing bugs they can reproduce and working on fixing them.

And in regards to the license issue, that would be considered a small sin. If they started redistributing the DataTables code with a license that said it was theirs, then SpryMedia would care. Otherwise its really not worth the hassle.

[General Zod]

Why doesn't the website work the way it's supposed to? Because it was developed by two different contractors and the back end doesn't really talk to the front-end much.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/won ... -a-garage/

You may be surprised to learn that when you arrive at HealthCare.Gov the first page you see on the Web site was not built in a bland office park somewhere in Virginia. It was built in the District of Columbia. By a team of 12 engineers. Their offices are in a garage, and they wanted to use the site to buy themselves health insurance in 2014.
Really.
Before large contractors took over, a small firm called Development Seed laid much of the groundwork for the site that millions of Americans are trying to access today. It spent four months, starting in March, as a government sub-contractor, building the version of HealthCare.Gov that launched in June. Their work remains the home page of the newly launched Web site.
Development Seed is by no means the entire force behind the massive Web site. A bigger company, CGI Federal, developed the back-end functions where people create accounts and find out if they're eligible for coverage. CGI has declined requests for comment.
I did, however, get a chance to chat with Development Seed president Eric Gundersen about the issues with access to HealthCare.Gov. "This is not the launch I expected," Gundersen said. "I expected I would be able to register and get health insurance." I asked Gundersen to help explain how HealthCare.Gov is supposed to work and what the current problems are.
There are two big parts of HealthCare.Gov, built by different contractors.
This is a point that David Auerbach has made over at Slate and one that Gundersen went through in detail. Development Seed built the front end of HealthCare.Gov, the Web site you see when you go to HealthCare.Gov, and also the resources behind the "Start Here" button.
"Our main contribution is the home page," Gundersen said. "That's the stuff we released in June and scaled throughout the summer and through last week, as more people were coming to sign up and the home page was getting more traffic."
Development Seed and CGI used different technology to power their parts of the site. That means that clicking on different buttons - "Apply Now" versus "Start Here" - will take you to vast sites that essentially speak different languages.

The application section has had much more trouble handling the high volume of traffic than has the home page, although it's also doing some heavy lifting by sending tons of information between federal agencies.
The two parts of HealthCare.Gov don't talk to each other very much.
Development Seed finished its work this summer. It then handed off its files to CGI Federal, which received a contract from the Department of Health and Human Services back in December 2011 to work on the federal marketplace. The two firms have not communicated since. The federal government has Development Seed signed up for an additional 100 hours of work but, since the Oct. 1 launch, the firm hasn't been asked to do anything.
Development Seed never bid to build the back end of HealthCare.Gov because it didn't believe it had the legal team to go through the procurement process. The firm's first contract happened largely by happenstance: Obama administration officials had been reading the agency's blog, liked what they saw and asked the team to come onboard.
Even then, Development Seed wasn't working directly with the federal government. It got involved as a subcontractor to a larger firm called Aquilent, which declined to comment for this report. A spokeswoman said that Aquilent was "not authorized to discuss the site in any way."
HealthCare.Gov's original developers can't tell you what's wrong with HealthCare.Gov.
When Development Seed was working on HealthCare.Gov, they made a conscious choice to keep all of their code open-source. CGI Federal's part of the Web site, which powers things such as account creation, is not open source, which means that Gundersen is essentially an outside observer like the rest of us.
Reddit commenters have also noted the difference. "The marketplace API (closed source) and the website frontend (open source) were built in connected but separate processes by two different entities," one commenter recently pointed out. "The code for the marketplace was not 'yanked', it was never published."
"If people had more insight into the code, and it was open, a lot more people would have a sense of what's happening," Gundersen said. "Since day one, we were open code. Right now, anyone can look at the raw source code, and there's none of the black box speculation. A lot of people are now getting to see how messed up IT procurement is. They can feel the pain of what's happened with some critical software."
Development Seed was hoping to buy its own coverage on the marketplace.
The firm had an even more personal stake in its software: It hoped to purchase coverage for employees through the health law's marketplace. Right now, it gives workers a set stipend to purchase their own plan in the individual market.
"This week I wanted to come in and get everyone registered," he said. That, as of this posting, has not happened.
I asked Gundersen how he thinks things will go in coming days, whether the site will be more functional anytime soon. He offered a few thoughts:
"This is going to get fixed. This is a lot of scale. They got, in 24 hours, more people trying to register than Twitter got users in 24 months. Do you remember how many fail whales [Twitter error messages] there were then? Let's not all hate on the government here."
KLIFF NOTES: Top health policy reads from around the Web
Many warned that Obamacare's Web sites would have errors. "Major insurers, state health-care officials and Democratic allies repeatedly warned the Obama administration in recent months that the new federal health-insurance exchange had significant problems, according to people familiar with the conversations. Despite those warnings and intense criticism from Republicans, the White House proceeded with an Oct. 1 launch." Juliet Eilperin, Amy Goldstein and Sandhya Somashekhar in The Washington Post.
State-based marketplaces are running a whole lot smoother. "While many people have been frustrated in their efforts to obtain coverage through the federal exchange, which is used by more than 30 states, consumers have had more success signing up for health insurance through many of the state-run exchanges, federal and state officials and outside experts say. Alan R. Weil, the executive director of the National Academy for State Health Policy, an independent nonpartisan group, credited the relative early success of some state exchanges to the fact that they could leap on problems more quickly than the sprawling, complex federal marketplace." Robert Pear and Abby Goodnough in the New York Times.
Nearly one-third of Connecticuts' Access Health CT applicants are under 35. "The exchange received 1,157 applications, [Access Health chief executive Kevin] Counihan said. The silver plans were the most popular, drawing 49 percent of the early subscribers, while 26 percent picked gold plans. Twenty-one percent of customers have picked bronze plans, which have the lowest premiums available to most people and cover the lowest share of medical costs. Another 4 percent will purchase catastrophic policies, which are available only to people under 30 and offer the least comprehensive coverage." Arielle Levin-Becker in the Connecticut Mirror.

So you really can't lay all the blame at the contractors here, the government should have been making sure they were communicating properly. Without any deeper knowledge, I'd say there was a good chance of one firm having an NDA saying they couldn't communicate outside firms without permission, meaning they couldn't talk to the original sub-contractors unless they were included in their contracts.

[Knife]

I expect the product to work. I expect people to do their jobs as they are contracted to do them. If you think the risk of major IT projects being scrapped isn't something that impacts the private side, you are sadly mistaken. I especially expect the system to work when it costs 5-10 times the originally budgeted amount.

Based off of MJ and Napolean's posts, should your ire then be at the private sector companies who botched it?

[TimothyC]

Based off of MJ and Napolean's posts, should your ire then be at the private sector companies who botched it?

Some of the blame goes there, but I also lay blame at the feet people at HHS who should have seen this coming, and didn't. I expect a higher quality of work out of people who are civil servants and who have government contracts than I do out of regular business.

[Block]

Based off of MJ and Napolean's posts, should your ire then be at the private sector companies who botched it?

Some of the blame goes there, but I also lay blame at the feet people at HHS who should have seen this coming, and didn't. I expect a higher quality of work out of people who are civil servants and who have government contracts than I do out of regular business.

Then you're an idiot.

[TimothyC]

Then you're an idiot.

Why am I an idiot for assigning (partial) responsibility to the people who were supposed to oversee the project when it goes fail-tastic?

[General Zod]

Then you're an idiot.

Why am I an idiot for assigning (partial) responsibility to the people who were supposed to oversee the project when it goes fail-tastic?

Why do you expect high quality work out of the lowest bidder?

[TimothyC]

Why do you expect high quality work out of the lowest bidder?

Yes, and if you (both the company and the employees) can't do the job, then they (again the employees and the company) should be banned from bidding again. I think the entire system needs to be fixed.

[TimothyC]

Why do you expect high quality work out of the lowest bidder?

Yes, and if you (both the company and the employees) can't do the job, then they (again the employees and the company) should be banned from bidding again. I think the entire system needs to be fixed.

Sorry, I missed the first word.

I expect it because it should be expected. We as tax payers should expect to get the most out of what we pay for, and that those who spend the money and provide services (both contracted and otherwise) don't use it to enrich themselves.