sigh
People are not idiots. Large problems are never easy. Politics, management, and salesmanship are genuine parts of the problem, not useless distractions from technical stuff.
I'm not saying that improvement is impossible, I'm saying that improvement is hard. The healthcare.gov system could have gone live, and been functional, on October 1 - if you could hire better technical people. Can you hire a top-notch team of techies in this environment? Ever tried it? It could be working if the political appointees had nailed down the requirements earlier. Have you ever tried getting hundreds of legally-mandated decisions pushed through the federal bureaucracy? Many of those decisions were pushed back for political reasons, which sucks - but could you made the unpopular decisions early, then won enough elections to keep Republicans from dismantling the entire thing? The system could be working if the law made more sense in a dozen different ways, but all of those compromises were necessary to get the law passed in the first place. Have you ever tried to write legislation, and get it through congress?
Don't get me wrong - the healthcare.gov system is a clusterfuck, and there are easily identifiable reasons for that - in retrospect. And hopefully we can learn from the failures and move forward. But laying it all at the feet of some nebulous government employee is completely unhelpful.