I've said this before. The fact that these people (government and it's contractors) are going to have and handle our most intimate information AND that the IRS is also in the loop scares the living daylights out of me. The level of incompetence being revealed here is almost without description.
To go all the way up to opening day, have these problems and then offer that five million lines of code need to be redone is, well, I'm at a loss for words. I am trying to think about how badly one could fuck up five million lines of, say, Python. That's a lot of code. It's almost like saying that you set out to write a portal for the ACA and mistakenly wrote an navigation system for a new spacecraft.
In many ways this is great. I can't think of a better example of how bad big government can be and often is. It is hard to argue with what is unfolding before our very eyes: An attempt at centralized control that succeeded on the legislative front but is failing miserably in execution due to nothing less than incompetence at all levels. And, to boot, it is costing hundreds of millions and will probably cost billions if it doesn't implode under it's own mess.
Look at this in sharp contrast with what I happen to think would have been a far better approach: Free market decentralized healthcare. All they had to do is open interstate borders to launch all available companies into competition and slowly open other gates in order to promote free and open competition. Yes, judicious regulations would have been required here and there, but always with the goal of having an ecosystem that is as free as reasonably possible.
In this scenario at worst the government would launch a open-source projects to develop open and well-debated APIs for publishing and sharing all pertinent information. Various sites could then connect to any available insurance company through these standard API's in order to gather, present and sell insurance to anyone. Instead of having a badly executed centralized attempt to develop a portal you'd have thousands of entrepreneurs jump into the fray for an opportunity to offer the best possible services. Very soon the best-in-breed services would rise to the top and continually evolve better and better offerings.
Cheaper, faster, better. All three.
Instead we got this shit.