No more predictable lede than this could have been written about the failure of the insurance exchange software (emphasis mine):
The technical problems that have hampered enrollment in the online health insurance exchanges resulted from the failure of a major software component, designed by private contractors, that crashed under the weight of millions of users last week, federal officials said Monday.
Our friends at Demos have done a little bit of research on the whole government contractor grift, and here’s what they’ve found:
In this brief, we extrapolate from the GAO study to estimate that the federal government is spending an estimated $20.8 to $23.9 billion a year to pay private contractors for the compensation of top executives. $6.97 to $7.65 billion in taxpayer dollars is spent annually on pay that exceeds the U.S. Vice President’s salary of $230,700 a year.
In a nutshell, here are my educated guesses of why exchange software is failing:
- The massive overhead involved in government contracting (not just C-level salaries, but also the waste involved in the sales process) meant that percentage of the budget for exchanges devoted to actual work and workers wasn’t sufficient for the development and testing the sites needed.
- Government outsourcing culture leads itself to lack of accountability on the part of government employees and lies on the part of contractors. Lack of accountability comes from the contractor, not the contract manager, getting the blame for failure. Lies come from the contractor saying anything to win the contract, knowing that failure just means more money will be thrown at the problem.
But those are just my guesses. Maybe some of you who have been involved in contracted government software have a few other ideas.
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