Okay, just laying out some observations with some questions,
1) The software company in charge of writing the code cut its teeth with the Bush administration. That means that somewhere, somehow they have an important connect to higher ups in the Bush administration.
Questions,
What software did they write or websites design? Were these successful and one time and within budget? If yes why is this website so different? If not why were they hired?
2) This is what really stoked my interest. The NY Times is reporting the website is 500,000,000 lines of code. Every programmer I have talked to said this is absurd and suggests gross incompetence. The comments I have been reading online suggest the same. Maybe as Josh Marshall suggests this is a typo. If not this suggests one of two things (though not mutually exclusive). Much of the code writing was outsourced to perhaps other social contexts (off shore chop and paste shops trying to prove how much they are working by the amount of code). There was little oversight to this outsourcing if it happened. The outsourcing is unusual but the lack of oversight before delivery is.
Again I have to ask the questions. Were the programs this overwritten in the work done for the Bush administration. If not, why the difference? If so why were they hired?
3) There seems to be no QA (quality assurance) and a limited beta testing model. On every project I have ever worked on or witnessed the QA person/people were the strongest on the team. They would flag problems relatively quickly. There are roll outs that don't work but not with this many problems. There is also always, always, always a beta phase. What happened during this beta phase? Why weren't problems reported? Were they ignored? Who ignored them, the QA people or the government. I think there should be a release of the beta phase data?
Again, were there this many problems in Quality Assurance for the software written for the Bush administration? If not, what was the difference? If yes, why were they hired again.
And for those who might accuse me of a being a conspiracy theorist, do you really think that people would shut down the entire United States government and bring it to default to sabotage ACA but wouldn't mess with proprietary code?