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Healthcare.gov Official Resigns, Website Still a Disaster
Nerval's Lobster writes "A government official who helped oversee the bug-riddled Healthcare.gov Website has resigned his post. Tony Trenkle, Chief Information Officer (CIO) for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees Healthcare.gov, will reportedly join the private sector after he departs on November 15. A spokesperson for the Medicare agency refused to say whether he had been forced out, telling reporters: 'Tony made a decision that he was going to move to the private sector and that is what our COO announced yesterday.' Because of his supervisory role, Trenkle is considered a significant player in the Website's development; The New York Times indicated that he was one of two federal officials who signed an internal memo suggesting that security protocols for the Website weren't in place as recently as late September, a few days before Healthcare.gov's launch.Following Trenkle's resignation, Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius admitted to the Senate Finance Committee that Healthcare.gov would require hundreds of fixes. 'We're not where we need to be,' she said. 'It's a pretty aggressive schedule to get to the entire punch list by the end of November.' Sebelius added that she was ultimately accountable for what she termed the 'excruciatingly awful' rollout. Healthcare.gov has experienced massive problems since its Oct. 1 debut. In addition to repeated crashes and slow performance, the Website's software often prevents people from setting up accounts. President Obama has expressed intense frustration with the situation, but insists the Affordable Care Act (ACA) backing the Website remains strong. 'The essence of the law, the health insurance that's available to people is working just fine,' he told reporters in October. 'The problem has been that the website that's supposed to make it easy to apply for insurance hasn't been working.' While the federal government won't release 'official' enrollment numbers until the end of November, it's clear that the Website's backers are losing the battle of public perception."
You can't fix something that is fatally flawed. The problem isn't the website, the problem is the cluster fuck of a law they passed. No amount of code can fix a bad idea.
Sebelius added that she was ultimately accountable for what she termed the 'excruciatingly awful' rollout.
Accountable how? Will she get a black mark on her annual review? She still has her job.
While you might well be correct, the issue at hand is the website. It's a bit disingenuous to say the whole law is broken because of the website. That is, unless the same people who made the law are the ones coding.
They may fix or scrap it, but either is irrelevant. This is nothing but corporate welfare designed to pull tax dollars out of the middle class and put those dollars in the pockets of the healthcare industry. The poor benefit because they are the most likely to riot and resort to crime if they are forced to pay full-price, so they are given breaks and Jamal's repeated trips to the emergency room as a result of gang-related fights are subsidized by the taxpayers. The rich obviously don't need to give a shit, and congressmen and many other government workers are exempt anyway.
Even staunch supporters of Grand Dictator Baraq Hussein Sotero are now getting fucked by Obamacare, with their plans being cancelled and being charged 2-3 times for what is essentially the exact same plan. The American government is not even pretending that they aren't openly fucking the American people, Baraq himself says, "You're gonna take it in the ass, and you're gonna like it!"
-- Ethanol-fueled
How much did linux cost you, again? There's a difference there.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Obama never envisioned Obamacare actually working. It was just a means to an end - single payer. It was designed to be an utter failure from the get-go.
My previous analysis
Simply:
One: Schedule Fail. Compounded by late award of the contracts to develop/influence:
Contracts Awarded Dec 2011
Two: massive requirements base to develop specification for development and implementation: The PPACA was 1800+ pages, and the associated regulations are 10,000+ pages, and are STILL changing. Can't develop without a spec and design, with big parts of requirements still changing.
Three: inadequate testing. The above-referenced link states that security testing BEGAN in August 2013, less than two months before rollout. There's no mention of load testing. .
UPDATE: There WAS load testing, Radio reports say it was tested with a 1000-user simultaneous load. EXPECTED was 60K simultaneous users. . .
However, the only CONCRETE numbers I've found say it crashed at several hundred simultaneous users. . .
Four: Integration issues. The Obamacare Exchange system combines data from numerous agencies and systems, and integrating between them is always a difficult task.
Five: Identity-management. This is in parallel to Integration, somehow all identities need to be federated into a single overarching system.
Twenty-three (now 25) months, even with a top-flight team, would simply not be enough to do this: this is a 5-7 year job. . .
As with all politically connected people, I'm sure a soft landing "place" was made for him in one of the companies owned/operated by one of the generous political donors to the current overlord administration's party, so he would be comfortable vacating his current cushy post before he became a total embarassment.
This is probably not too dissimilar to how some dictators seem to find themselves living with an annual stipend in some remote area of the world...
It's like saying your car is broken because the website you tried to buy your car from crashes a lot.
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
That is true. But what we can do is divided large sophisticated software packages (OS or applications) into 2 categories.
“Big Bang” packages where the entire packaged is released at once. Vista and Health Care web site are two examples. These have a history of delays, cost overruns, and initial releases performing poorly. This is particularly true for government ones.
“Evolutionary” packages which come about from a lot of small incremental changes. Linux and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 are 2 examples. Issues are know so things are stable. Thing gradually get better. Lots of legacy code that lend itself to lots of legacy “features” (a.k.a. bugs).
By choosing the “big bang” method we know the kind of troubles we are going to run into. As such extra effort should have been put into delivering requirements on time so adequate testing could be done. At times this means rejecting additional features or (in the worst case) functionality.
Look, I use Linux and love Linux and am even considering fully switching away from Windows but let me just say that cost is not only measured in money. It's also measured in time. There are certain users for whom Windows (7) will provide all the functionality they need without ever needing an additional driver, or a new window manager (KDE vs Unity vs Gnome), or a custom screensaver (why does Ubuntu not come with a screensaver?), etc, etc. We're doing ourselves a disservice by assuming everyone wants what we want. A lot of people are genuinely comfortable with Windows and our refusal to see that only clouds our vision, not Microsoft's.
I'm not sure how much of a political embarrassment it really is. Yeah it should be working, but I'm not sure embarrassment is the right word. The right wants to make the website it an embarrassment, but they would want to paint whatever happens as an embarrassment even if the website worked perfectly. The left wishes the website would have worked. But with close to 2 months left before anyone is required to have insurance, there's still time.
Look at previous administrations for more embarrassing things. Bush with his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, lies about WMD, and everything that resulted in the "War on Terrorism". That's an embarrassment. With Clinton, the affair with Monica Lewinsky and all that came with that was an embarrassment.
If Obama is going to be embarrassed politically, I think it should be more for his domestic and international spying programs.
I've been on enough big-bang massive IT projects to know that this is no different from anything we've seen before.
- Ambiguous requirements that aren't settled, and constantly changing (stuff that even "agile" can't account for): This is always a killer. Even an "agile" project can't have the framework ripped down and rebuilt at the last second...some decisions have to be permanent.
- Contractors who just want to collect money : Outsourcing is always more expensive and produces worse results than if you do it in house. The only thing you save is the cost of employees, but you pay more in the long run.
- Entrenched groups who don't want to see it succeed: ERP implementations often fail because the business processes that need to be changed are held up by people or groups that don't want their job changed or automated away, and have powerful friends.
- Massive time pressure: I don't know why software development and IT are so different from engineering projects, but there is still the persistent myth that you can throw bodies at a late project to make it come in on time. You can't do this with a construction project of any reasonable size...there are still dependencies. Yet, there's always pressure to make arbitrary dates.
Seriously, replace "government healthcare insurance marketplace connecting people with thousands of insurers" with "SAP implementation", and you see the same problems.
I can see why they made this guy resign though -- someone has to be the scapegoat. At one of the companies I worked at, the much-loved founder of the company was thrown out by the board (it had grown into a public company) after a massive operations disaster that forced him to go out and publicly apologize. Some of it might have been willful blindness, but executives tend to say "I'm paying millions of dollars, just make this happen and don't bother me with details." Consulting companies love these kind of executives....
If it's this big of a mess just to sign-up for a healthcare plan, imagine how bad it would be if the government was tasked to run all of healthcare as some politicians would like.
>
But you tell me, if you are a cook who cooks great 3 min omlets and some smuck comes in
and gives you $1000 for a 1 minute omlete , what do you do ?
I tell you what I wouldn't do - give him a salmonella-inducing, raw fucking egg and call it an omelette. Because I'm not a moral-less piece of shit who values profits over the health and safety of my customers.
If the job can't be done under the criteria set forth, it can't be fucking done under the criteria set forth. You tell the fuckers that, and when they say, "well, we'll pay you extra to make the impossible happen," you politely decline, tip your hat, and be about your fucking business. Because guess what? When shit hits the fan and people start to suffer actual harm, who do you think is going to end up on that cross - the assholes that paid for it, or the idiot who tried to make a quick buck by willfully poisoning his customer base?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Here's the root of the problem and would explain why Obama, Sebelius, and other bureaucrats are sticking to their guns. They believe that they are smarter than the software engineers charged with building this monstrosity. From my own experience, I once got into a pissing contest with a senior VP over something I had developed for the department. He had no background in software or computers. None. Even though the guy had a Mac on his desk, he didn't understand the concept of windows and insisted on using a single one to view his files opening hundreds of turn-down triangles. Hundreds. But I digress. The guy only understood image, flash, and how things looked. His precious weekly schedules had to look pretty rather than be functional to the point where the secretaries were spending an entire day putting together a weekly schedule in QuarkXPress. So I built a database system (with the assistance of one of the secretaries) to generate these schedules. But the database engine we had available to us, while it could use fancy fonts, didn't understand variable character widths. So printing schedules using dingbats was a nightmare. During a presentation, some flunky asked if we could make some changes. The secretary said "Well I don't know. We're jumping through a lot of hoops to make it do what you're seeing now. I don't know if it's possible." The VP said "It's possible" without even asking me. I nearly quit that day. As a matter of interest, a few of my coworkers and I had a daily reading from The Dilbert Principle.
Point is that Obama and his minions don't understand that you can't set arbitrary deadlines for technology when they know nothing about it. It's the same as ignorant politicians setting lofty fuel economy standards without talking to automotive engineers to find out if the goal is realistic or even possible. The politicians believe their own hype in that they think they are smarter than the engineers. At the very least. One can also make the case that unrealistic goals aren't set out of ignorance but by design to suit their ideology. E.g. Set a pollution standard bar so high that it either isn't possible or that it's so expensive that nobody will bother and voila, the source of that pollution is gone taking all the benefits (jobs, consumer savings, useful product) with it. To the politician, the ends justify the means because in their mind, the citizenry is too stupid to understand it.
I used mod points in section which are now wasted, but it was worthwhile to correct this post. The Obama Administration only reviewed only a single bid for the Obamacare website http://washingtonexaminer.com/article/2537194. Whether that constitutes a no bid contract can be argued, but that is usually what is meant by that phrase. If you do not consider that a no bid contract then Halliburton was not awarded a no bid contract in Iraq. Calling the statement that this is a no-bid contract a myth is at best disingenuous.
False. It comes from bad management, and bad program techniques.
It really seems like a system that no one bothered to break the code out into tiny bits laid out over a good API architecture for data sharing.
There are good software system of more complex code.
"a badly conceived law could be a reason for the poor performance of the site if it puts overly burdensome constraints on the system."
the law is a set of rules to apply. Nothing more. That is no reason for broken code. If you are talking about adding a second or three to a responce, you would be right.
as a side note:
" draconianly complex law " doesn't make sense.
It could be a byzantine law, but draconianly isn't complex..also, I don't think it's an actual word.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I believe this post IS "ethanol fueled", as it is certainly not the work of a sober person. There is at most, ONE correct statement in it. For example - The ACA limits the amount that insurance companies can crank up rates, and so will likely cut the huge profits they have been collecting. It also makes it impossible for the insurance companies to "cherry-pick" customers, and, only provide policies for the healthy folks who do not need them and will not put in a claim. It also stops the insurance companies from dumping sick folks that are going to require payouts.
It is true that as a part of it, the act provides for subsidies to make an insurance policy that actually is helpful be affordable to the poverty-stricken. However, your somewhat racist remark about the trips to the emergency room are not relevant. First...a huge percentage of the people being helped by this are the working poor - like the "sales associates" at Walmart, who make so little they qualify for food stamps. These subsidies will make it possible for good, hardworking Americans to get adequate health care and NOT end up bankrupt in the process. Now, about Jamal.. Apparently you do not realize that (assuming you have insurance) you are already subsidizing the trips to the ER by gang-bangers. Hospitals in America are required, by law, to treat everyone that shows up at the ER, regardless of their ability to pay. So..the hospital simply cranks up the cost for the folks that DO pay to cover these folks. With the ACA, there is a much better chance that everyone that shows up will have insurance, and be able to cover some or all of the cost of their treatment.
Your comment about the rich is probably the only accurate and correct statement in this post. Your comment about the government being exempt is far from true. As a matter of fact, they are REQUIRED to go into the exchanges to get insurance, unlike the rest of us that have a choice. Here is a decent analysis of the whole situation: http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/fixgov/posts/2013/10/04-aca-vitter-amendment-federal-workforce-hudak
Finally, the government has NO control over the insurance companies canceling policies. The fact is that the policies that are getting dumped are the junk policies that cover nothing, and are nothing but profit centers for the insurance company. The ACA's requirements for amounts to be spent and such make these unprofitable, so, the insurance companies are dropping them. However this has little or nothing to do with the ACA. The companies were doing this on a yearly basis for decades, in an attempt to force customers into higher profit policies. So...do not blame the greed of the insurance companies on the Government. Also, your opinion about premium amounts is meaningless, since these folks are likely to qualify for subsidies. So far, the reports that have come in that have been verified as true show that the monthly cost of insurance has either stayed the same (but, with much better coverage), or dropped quite a bit.
Just because you do not like Barak (the CORRECT spelling of his name), for whatever reason, is no call to lie and spread mis-information.
pleasant dreams
dave
YAB - http://blog.beemandave.com/
The fact that the state websites seem to be working very well would seem to contradict your parroting of republican talking points.
It's just silly to count the cost of insurance without counting the benefits of the coverage.
All I needed to know about Obamacare was that it is a form of price control.
Well well.. so you've made up your mind and just looking for facts to support your case. However, I'm afraid to say, you are wrong.
First of all, the ACA is not what is understood in economics as price controls. It is not a price floor, nor a price ceiling.
Secondly, not all price controls are bad. Some are necessary as the market is not always optimal. Most of the time they are enacted to even out bargaining power discrepancies, and it generally makes the economy more efficient when done correctly. For example, there is a reason for the minimum wage - otherwise you have more and more working poor that rely on benefits (however, this didn't stop Wal-Mart due to deficiencies in the minimum wage), or alternatively you can cut all benefits and bring back poor laws and workhouses. There's a reason why we dumped that system.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
There is a bit of a difference between getting a letter from your insurance company that says "Due to the ACA we will be upgrading your plan at no cost to you to comply" and what we are seeing... Letters saying "Due to the ACA, we are canceling your policy effective Jan 1. You are welcome to apply for a much more expensive plan though us or the exchange... If you can even login."
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Well - let's examine this idea.
Let us suppose that General Motors is incapable of either putting up a website, or of contracting that job out to someone who is competent. Just suppose that General Motors has zero presence on today's internet. None. They are so clueless, that they don't see the need to invest the resources into an online presence. Just pretend that to be true.
Do you really think that such clueless fools could possibly build a safe, reliable automobile? Do you really?
That is what we are seeing with ACA. It's perfectly alright that none of the people in politics understand how to put up a website. What is unforgivable, is that they have no idea how to go about hiring competent people to put up their site.
If they are incapable of attracting and hiring competent people to perform one job, what in the HELL makes anyone think that they can find competent people to perform another job?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Going from $500 deductible to $9000.00 deductible is pretty much "losing insurance".
Aetna flat out told us this was because of the costs of ACA compliance. What costs those are, I have no idea, because my plan has paid out exactly NOTHING in the last year. We got one ACA "Well Baby" visit, but that would have been covered before. Everything else has been out-of-pocket.
My old plan was AWESOME. My wife c-section cost us.... $500. Offspring #2 is due in March and it's going to cost me $9000.
"If you like your plan, you can keep your plan" WAS A LIE.
$150million or whatever it cost for a broken website is hardly a bargain.
Nice job illustrating the ACs point
>We're doing ourselves a disservice by assuming everyone wants what we want
>Ah, you want something that show you ponies, rainbows and stuff? I don't know, never felt the need for it.
How so? The law passed when the Democrats controlled both houses. Not a single R voted for it, nor were any needed to pass it, so the D's got what they wanted. In fact, R's were kept out of many of the planning meetings. The reason the law is bad is that it is much too complicated with many facets written as TBD at the HHS Secretary's discretion. The implementation is left to the amorphous bureaucracy. I don't think any of our representatives know what's in the law and none have read it cover-to-cover, at least not before voting it in. It's just too damn long.
The Government did allow you to keep your plan. It's Aetna that decided to screw you over and try to get you to blame someone else. It seems to have worked, because instead of directing your ire at the insurance industry's thieving, scheming, middle-men, you're angry at the administration trying to reform a horribly broken system in a political climate where it's virtually impossible to get anything done even when you're willing to adopt ideas from the other side as a compromise.
And that's exactly what the individual mandate was--a huge compromise of liberal values to adopt a Republican idea. The fact that no Republican voted for it even then shows how spiteful and divisive they are.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
The Government did allow you to keep your plan.
No, no it doesn't. Grandfathered in plans were not allowed to change at all since 2011, and that simply is never going to happen over three years. Change the doctors covered under the plan? Plan changed and can't be grandfathered in. Adjust costs due to inflation? Plan changed and can't be grandfathered in. Increase coverage? Plan changed and can't be grandfathered in.
Obamacare was written in such a way to guarantee these plans would be dropped. Period. Obama knew you weren't going to be able to keep your plans. Period.
You can't blame the insurance companies for this. There was no way they were ever going to be able to actually meet the requirements to grandfather in plans, if for no other reason than simple inflation.
And that's exactly what the individual mandate was--a huge compromise of liberal values to adopt a Republican idea. The fact that no Republican voted for it even then shows how spiteful and divisive they are.
Or that they looked at Massachusetts, saw that Romney's attempt at implementing it didn't work, and didn't want to send the nation down the same path. It's not hard to see that Obamacare doesn't and never will work. The HealthCare.gov debacle is proof enough of that.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
"Raise insurance costs on average" isn't accurate. It raises insurance costs among those who used to pay nothing at all or paid very little for what were basically scam coverage and provides better care for the increased cost to them and also pays a subsidy to those who were paying little because they couldn't afford it.
The average cost (that is including everyone in the country) will actually go down because the risk of needing healthcare will be spread across a wider pool of people, which is how insurance works.
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
Having open bids and only one "bidder" is actually different than sole source/no bid.
I would say yes and no. You can always write a contract such that there can only be one bidder. You just add restrictions that no one else can meet. Must have thousands of hours in experience building government exchanges would be a good choice.
There are zero free-market ideologues in the Democratic Party. Zero. And the ACA was passed without a singe Republican vote.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Sorry to say, but this is patently wrong. ACA is THE Democrat legislation that was presented - The Democrat party base DID push that. SOME demanded a single-payer system, many did NOT.
The meetings with Republicans went like this:
Republicans: "We'd like to see X, Y and Z"
Obama: "No, because elections have consequences"
And they pushed the legislation that they could get passed with ONLY their Democrat votes.
What really worries me is that, as you're an outsider, you post comments like yours which actually IS parroting nonsense because we in the US believe in this thing called individuality over socialized medicine where the rest of the world has turned their governments and their entire lives into nothing more than utopian daycare centers.
They weren't being screwed before. Many of these people had preexisting conditions that were being taken care of for a reasonable cost. Now, their plans are priced for things like gynecological exams for men and prostate exams for women. People treating their cancer are either going to go broke, rely on us to cover the cost, or simply die (plus, be taxed for the privilege). Is that an improvement?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The Government did allow you to keep your plan. It's Aetna that decided to screw you over and try to get you to blame someone else. It seems to have worked, because instead of directing your ire at the insurance industry's thieving, scheming, middle-men, you're angry at the administration trying to reform a horribly broken system in a political climate where it's virtually impossible to get anything done even when you're willing to adopt ideas from the other side as a compromise.
Actually, the Health and Human Services department is empowered to make rules that *all* healthcare plans must obey, including grandfathered ones.
So, you can only grandfather a plan if:
A) it never changes, not even to account for inflation
B) it obeys all new regulations put out by the Health and Human Services department for health insurance.
The only exception is plans that are part of a collective bargaining agreement(aka unions), those plans are allowed to change without losing grandfathered status so long as the changes are to make it come into agreement with HHS regulations.
And let me tell you, no plan I have ever had will provide female oral contraceptives without a co-pay, so no plan I have ever had could be grandfathered under the current rules.
Ahh yes... the Democrats were more than willing to compromise.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/25/AR2010102502408.html
"The decline of the Obama presidency can be traced to a meeting at the White House just three days after the inauguration, when the new president gathered congressional leaders of both parties to discuss his proposed economic stimulus. House Republican Whip Eric Cantor gave President Obama a list of modest proposals for the bill. Obama said he would consider the GOP ideas, but told the assembled Republicans that "elections have consequences" and "I won." Backed by the largest congressional majorities in decades, the president was not terribly interested in giving ground to his vanquished adversaries. "
The compromise was between far left Democrats and center left Democrats, the Republicans never entered into it. At no point were the Dems who were pushing for this courting or expecting Republican votes, hence the procedural trickery they did in the Senate to pass it, but they did require the blue dogs and other center left Dems.
As for the Republican alternative, it was not to pass an omnibus bill which almost never leads to good results, but to pass separate bills to correct flaws in the system in a more piecemeal and less painful way; a method that would make it easier to make corrections as they arose as well as ensure a better understanding of each individual bill and it's impacts.
They wanted to remove restrictions on cross border insurance purchases (to allow for more competition), they proposed allowing individuals to claim the same deductions as businesses to try and break the employer based system, there was also support for legislation to remove lifetime limits and help people with preexisting conditions and even for leaving your adult kids on your family plan (under certain conditions). Their main issue was that because these were separate proposal and not a blanket catch all bill, people like you either through ignorance (which could be due to the lack of media coverage of these proposals) or simple denial, continually state they had no alternative.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
Millions of people who had insurance that worked for them are discovering that that plan is gone, and the cheapest plan on the exchange costs twice as much, has deductibles far higher, and coverers a smaller network of doctors. This is a very common story.
Something is deeply wrong here the entire premise here was that normal people could find a better plan on the exchange, and if they didn't they could keep the plan they had. Both claims were lies, and predictably so: the ACA is designed to push healthcare costs for the old and sick onto the young and healthy, so everyone young and healthy must, by design, pay a lot more to make the system work.
You high UID and claims of "fake insurance" make it pretty obvious you're a paid astroturfer. We don't like your sort here. Please go away.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Should over three years been enough time to build it?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
At no point were the Dems who were pushing for this courting or expecting Republican votes, hence the procedural trickery they did in the Senate to pass it, but they did require the blue dogs and other center left Dems.
WRONG, WRONG, WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. How can people be so ignorant of something that happened only a few years ago? http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112222617
Here's an interesting quote from Republican Senator Grassley:
"No public option. No play-or-pay. No things that are going to lead to any rationing of health care. No interference with the doctor-patient relationship," says Grassley. "About the only place we haven't made progress along the lines of what Republicans are wanting on the bill is in tort reform."
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
The difference is, the fighters are hugely complex and bleeding edge. A website is pretty old hat in 2013.
From what I've read, it's actually sorta the opposite. The healthcare.gov site is generally described as a bureaucratic database horror story. Multiple databases, actually, each with its own API (that's poorly documented), each one elsewhere on the Net, with unrealistic response-time "requirements" written by managers with little distributed-DB experience. And no understanding that messages between sites can't move faster than the speed of light.
Funny thing is that I've also read a number of comments recently about the zillions of cases where new decrees from Congress are handled by thousands of government web sites within a day or two. Thus, the recent "shutdown" was handled gracefully by most departments' web sites, and they were back up within a day or so when the people were called back to work.
So it's not that "the government" can't handle building and revising web sites. Thousands of departments are doing it the job routinely, and nobody notices because it usually goes smoothly.
But healthcare.gov by its very nature has attracted the attention of every politician within reach, most of which qualify as PHBs who want their name attached to the results but are otherwise clueless about this InterWeb stuff. The result is a flood of conflicting orders coming down to the grunts doing the actual web-site development, with radical changes appearing in their inboxes daily.
I'm sure that lots of readers here can identify with this situation. How often have the rest of you seen exactly this sort of mess in a corporate setting? I'm sure we can collect a lot of good horror stories. Or we can just go over to The Daily WTF and read about (or submit them) them there.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.