Well, I don't know.
The private sectors seems willing to pay 3 BILLION DOLLARS for a BS message/photo sharing app (Snapchat) that one could have built in 6 months with 2-3 man years of effort.
Compared to the trivialness of that, the healthcare website is rocket science.
Anyone can build a Snapchat, but not anyone can have millions of active users.
Sorry, just had to point out my opinion that that argument isn't too relevant to the discussion.
Source? AFAIK not even the craziest right-wing conspiracy blog out there claims healthcare.gov cost a billion dollars to create.
The Washington Post has the best reporting on it so far. It puts the figure for the website development and support itself at $174M and casts doubt on the wildest one out there ($600M). Also, there are significant costs on the IRS side of things that by definition couldn't be delivered by the private sector.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/10/...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/11/...
For the last year, I have been working with a team of 20+ to accomplish only half of a task that would have been absolutely trivial in comparison with my last job in the fully private sector. It could have been accomplished by one person working for 6 months, or perhaps 2 working for 4 months.
The government pays for 20 times the personnel, quadruple the required time, and gets a quarter the quality in return. And this team is rated very highly by the government's idiotic metrics.
Since the contractor companies also skim off the difference between what the government pays them for the labor and what they actually pay their employees, I can easily believe from my anecdotal experience that government is capable of wasting 99% of everything that it spends.
While waste does not disappear entirely from the economy, it is not directed into useful production, which is the basis of a healthy economy. What it does is build a human ecosystem around absolute fraud and purchasing political favors and influence.
That doesn't account at all for the things that government does to destroy the wealth-building activities of others, such as requiring barbers to spend thousands of dollars to get licensed to cut hair for $10 a pop, or demanding that 8-year-old kids selling lemonade buy business licenses.
It would appear the Federal site project was poorly managed.
This is not a failure of ideology, and it's definitely not limited to the public sector.
My conclusion is supported by fact, data and experience beyond what could be covered in a twenty line HN post. Government, as currently devolved in the US, is very much the problem. The solution is less of it. Radically less. Everywhere.
[0]http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_production_in_Afghanist...
> The 2012 Federal government expenditures were 3.54 trillion. Right off the top, the Federal government accounts for 22.6%
We thankfully have a canonical example that exposes just how bad government can be: Obamacare.
Government is the only organization on the planet that can take a website that could not possibly cost more than one to five million (as a ridiculous maximum) and turn it into a disaster costing upwards of a billion dollars. Think about THAT for a moment. It took government A BILLION DOLLARS just to make a website that the private sector could have delivered for A THOUSAND TIMES less money and in a third of the time. And, of course, it would have worked as required on day one.
I am not going to propose government money utilization is a thousand times less efficient than in the private sector across all domains. If I had to guess, based on my direct experience selling to various government agencies and seeing just how convoluted the process can become, I'd say the private sector is 50 to 100 times more efficient at everything. The exception, of course, is killing people and spying on the population.
I'll go with 100 times for easy numbers. This means whatever government accomplished with 3.54 trillion could have been done privately for a mere 35 billion. Even if I am off by a factor of ten this is still a major difference.
This means that this 22.6% participation is mostly money being burned. The actual real impact of government is probably somewhere in the the 2% or less range.
To use the lovely Obamacare canonical government-incompetence-and-waste example. Ask yourself this question: What could we have done with a billion dollars if instead of letting government burn it to try to build a website we had given five million of that to a qualified private entity to build the site and devoted $995 billion to, say, medical research or other massively valuable causes? Right. They just burned money that could have funded the discovery of a cure for Cancer and who knows what else.
You have to consider this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Federal_Spending_-_FY...
and then this:
http://nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-budget-1...
Hard to argue that the money is being spent with both discretion and intelligence. I point you to the 57% in military spending our many wars, pointless foreign aid, Solyndra and the inability to even manage the development of a website as proof.
No. Less government is better for all of us.