http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/21/technol ... contracts/Overall, the government has spent $394 million setting up the website and the exchanges through which the public can buy health insurance, according to a report earlier this year from the General Accountability Office, a government watchdog. While not all the money went into the troubled websites, most of it did.
Oldr, that was as of October 22nd, and it's probably a safe bet that since the website surge, we've probably sunk at least 100 million into it so 500 million (and counting) is probably a good estimate...
There's absolutely no excuse for this. They had three years, and basically unlimited cash. It came out in the testimony last month that they only spent two weeks doing the "end to end" testing of the system, (something that both the contractors and the and government officials said should have taken several months) and while they were doing the testing, the system crashed with just three hundred users on line....
That should have had flares and flags and whistles and sirens going up all over the place, but it didn't. This is really inexcusable, but there are basically two reasons for why they went ahead with the roll out when the shouldn't have, one from the bottom up, and one from the top down:
The bottom up reason became apparent at the hearings. At each level in the communication chain, both internally at CGI (the primary contractor) and CMS, (the HHS agency directly tasked overseeing the website's development) and between the two, the reports of the extent of the site's problems became progressively more softened and minimized so that by the time it got to the political level decision makers they were under the impression that all they'd be dealing with were the normal sort of shake out glitches one would expect with a site of this complexity. They didn't have the information that this thing was deeply and systemically flawed.
The top down reason was the enormous political pressure to get this thing rolled out on time. With the House Republicans trying to get Obamacare defunded, or at least delayed for a year, the top Administration officials (including Obama) really wanted to get this thing under way on October 1st, and were willing to take their chances on the site not being a complete bust. (In retrospect, a gamble which they obviously lost.) In the context of what was going on with continuing resolution and the debt ceiling, they believed that any sort of a delay in rolling it out (three months, six months, whatever) would be seen as political caving and they wanted to avoid it at all costs.
Looking back on it now, I'm sure Obama wishes he had decided to delay the roll out, and take the criticism that he would have gotten, but at the time he really did not have the full picture of just what an unmitigated disaster this was going to be. Of course the political pressure to get this done on time that was being applied may also have contributed to the information he was getting being soft peddled...(So both the bottom up reason and the top down reason sort of fed each other.)
There was an excellent in-depth article in The New York Times last week, (I think it was Tuesday) about what's going on now to try and fix this. Basically, the whole thing is being re-done from scratch, with just enough of a skeletal functionality being kept on line, (most of the time, anyway) for them to be able to claim that they are not in fact starting over some scratch...
