It would be nice if someone has a compiled timeline of events starting with extremely uncoordinated writing and passing of the law, to the point where technical specs were released to the contractor, when the actually flow of information and final HHS rules were announced, up through go live and the fixes being implemented after go live.
From what I've read/heard there was little to no work being done from 2010 when the bill was signed into law up through 2012. The administration purposely withheld information about Obamacare from the public and from the contractor due to the election year (2012) and didn't want bad press. Once the election had passed the government released more specs and information to the public and to the contractor on how the website was supposed to function. That's when we found out the dirty little lies and secrets. It's damn near impossible to build a website/service to handle 300M+ people in 6 months, but that's what our government did.
This whole bill/law/implementation has been bungled so badly by:
- the incompetent people who wrote it (bureaucrats with no understanding of health care and did not consult people from the health care industry)
- the incompetent people in Congress who blindly passed it without reading or understanding the devastating effect it would have
- the incompetent administration who continued to lie about how the law affected the citizens, and took no ownership of this massive project
Can anyone imagine a scenario where this could have been handled worse? Every step along the way was screwed up.