What difficulties would there be from the government's perspective, what issues would the companies experience when trying to create the interfaces and portals, and what issues would pop up for the users of the services?
> Development of the website's interface as well as its supporting back-end services, to make sure that the website could work to help people compare between health insurance plans, were both outsourced to private companies. The front-end of the website was developed by the startup Development Seed. The back-end work was contracted out to CGI Federal Inc., a subsidiary of the Canadian IT Multinational corporation| CGI Group, which subcontracted the work to other companies, as is common on large government contracts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov
This is particularly sad to me because this kind of thing should probably be a core competency of a modern government. The novel Jennifer Government lied to me :(
However as soon as you start asking people for money (for reservations) then it becomes a big fraud risk if the UI isn’t on a known same domain (such as something.gov).
This solution didn't need any investment from the USG.