"The system is unavailable"

Despite his prescient warning, the president didn’t seem to realize that the website not working was an actual possibility.

Healthcare.gov was frighteningly dysfunctional on day one. Users experienced multi-hour wait times, menus filled with blanks, and bizarre quirks like the "prison glitch" which stopped a user from proceeding until they specified how long they had been incarcerated, even if they had never been to prison.

My first attempts went nowhere. I again tried to set up an account, and I was successful but it didn't show me any policy options. I stared at it for a few minutes and then decided it was going to email me the options once it figured out which policies I could apply for. That was probably a month ago, and I've never gotten an email from them. Fritz Mills, IL

The site got millions of visits and thousands of applications in the first 24 hours, but only six people were able to enroll in plans. "We assumed that it was up and ready to run," Vice President Joe Biden told reporters.

The site is now basically functional after two months of repairs, but anecdotally, many people who started applications are still hung up on a glitch. Others successfully completed applications but are still waiting for quotes.

There are also problems with the site’s security, the extent of which are unknown, and issues with data being sent to insurance companies, which may cause some people to enroll in the wrong plans. The system to take payment for plans still hasn't been built yet.

Only 50,000 people reportedly enrolled in the first six weeks, far below the expected 500,000. Meanwhile, more than a third of uninsured Americans still haven’t heard of Healthcare.gov, suggesting there is a crush of traffic to come.

The disastrous launch is now serving as evidence for everything on the Republican agenda from repealing health care reform — a fundamentally divisive policy point between the two parties for decades — to delaying a vote on immigration.

However, the site’s very public flop has also sparked a debate that could turn the travesty into a teachable moment. Suddenly, everyone is talking about how the government builds technology.

Battleship mentality

"Federal IT procurement" is the new buzz-phrase in Washington, and Clay Johnson couldn’t be happier about it. He’s been on a crusade since Healthcare.gov’s botched launch, co-authoring a New York Times op-ed titled "Why the Government Never Gets Tech Right."

The quotes we had were all really expensive. That was the more discouraging part of the process. I can deal with technical problems, I realize that building a website for millions of people is a bitch, especially with something as sensitive as healthcare. I'm still not sure if I entered my wife's income information successfully. Richard Stroffolino, OH

Johnson wants higher salaries for government tech workers, a secretary of technology, and a national technology office like the UK’s Government Digital Service, founded after the failure of the $12 billion British national health-care site. But his highest priority is procurement reform.

Procurement is the term for the government’s Byzantine procedure for buying things. Under the current system, the federal government buys technology the way it buys battleships: with broad "Indefinite Delivery / Indefinite Quantity" (ID / IQ) contracts that pre-screen vendors to handle an agency’s projects for up to 10 years.

Johnson is a bit of an IT-procurement celebrity, having worked on a system that makes it easy for small companies to bid on government software projects during his time as a Presidential Innovation Fellow in the White House.

I got one application to complete and got a response saying I'm not qualified to buy insurance. This doesn't match the eligibility requirements published on the site. I've been told that I need to file an appeal. Ben Simo, AZ

"We’re in a really dangerous spot," Johnson tells The Verge on a recent trip to Washington, DC, after giving a talk about Healthcare.gov. "Technology gets twice as good or half as expensive every 18 months. The government has an efficiency problem when it comes to acquiring technology. So it’s behind that curve."

Because the procurement process is such a headache, agencies often lock in contractors for longer periods. This speeds things up, but it also gives preference to Beltway insiders and excludes smaller companies. As a result, new programming frameworks and development methods take a long time to reach the government. A company that has already bagged a 10-year contract has little incentive to innovate.

The companies that built Healthcare.gov were selected in 2007, more than two years before the government knew it would be building a health-care shopping site. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the health department agency responsible for the site, issued a $4 billion ID / IQ that covered large tech projects for the next 10 years and approved 16 companies to build them.

When CMS was put in charge of Healthcare.gov, it turned to the 16 contractors and asked who wanted to build what. Four submitted bids for the fattest contract, which covered the bulk of the marketplace. CMS selected the lowest bid, which came from CGI Federal, a Canadian firm that got into US government work by buying an American company with an abysmal track record for delivering on government contracts.

It took me 20 minutes and was the easiest insurance application I've ever seen. Not really sure what the fuss is all about. Brent Jackson, TN

Even the president acknowledges that this may have been a mistake. "The way the federal government does procurement and does IT is just generally not very efficient," Obama recently told a gathering of CEOs. "What we probably needed to do on the front end was to blow up how we procure for IT."

Zeroing in on procurement reform lets Obama shift the blame for Healthcare.gov’s inadequacy, but the rhetoric may have legs: the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA), a bipartisan procurement-reform bill, was just fast-tracked for a vote in the Senate.

"I’m pretty excited now because I think there is an opportunity for change," Johnson says. "It’s hard not to think of better ways to go than the system we have now."

Price of failure

So how much has the Healthcare.gov fiasco cost? Health secretary Kathleen Sebelius said it was $174 million in October. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said $318 million in August. GAO director of IT issues Dave Powner estimates it’s $600 million and growing, as contractors run up extra fees for fixing the site.

The true cost of Healthcare.gov is a mystery, another testament to the insanity of the procurement process. The ID / IQ includes other CMS projects, so isolating Healthcare.gov means deciphering the 256-character descriptions on thousands of "task orders" in the contracting data system, which can be as vague as "internal and external websites" or simply a purchase order number.

"It's really difficult to say with any accuracy how much it did cost," says Kaitlin Devine, a researcher at the nonprofit Sunlight Foundation who analyzed Healthcare.gov spending. "I asked somebody who is a procurement expert, who used to work at the GAO. I said, ‘Do you think it's conceivable that they don't even know what they spent?’ She was like, ‘Oh, absolutely. Like, totally.’"