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Comment by hsitz | Hacker News Reader

I'm assuming the task these guys have done is tiny portion of the actual work needed for the website.

I've been wondering for a while, though, why the federal government can't just buy/beg a copy of software running one of the exchanges for one of the states doing things themselves. Then they could modify it to work for other states. Maybe they'd then have to replace existing federal exchange with 26 different instances (one for each state that's a member of the federal exchange), but I can't imagine that the technical difficulties of modifying one state exchange's software to run with another state's data would be as bad as fixing what seem to the problems with the existing federal exchange website.

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Probably too late for the very hard mid-December deadline for those losing their insurance, maybe too late for getting enough young healthy people enrolled before adverse selection forces insane 2015 premium filings from insurance companies, which are due by the end of March.

They also have only 4 well functioning states' systems to chose from as I understand it.

The centralized subsidy calculation/verification/etc. process, which the Federal system does for all the exchanges is another issue, although I've only heard that some time ago is was known to produce incorrect results under testing.

Also would require the Federal government to admit a much bigger screwup than they've been willing to so far, in a process entirely driven by politics (http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/challenges-have-dogge...) until the last week of last month when CMS was fired and the fix-it czar was appointed.

If you've been in this game long enough you've seen projects and companies destroyed by a failure to take decisive action when it could have made a difference (or read, for example, Churchill's The Gathering Storm, or any shorter version of how WWII could have been so easily averted by preventing German rearmament). The odds are pretty high this is going to be another example of that.

Or allow one state to operate another state's exchange.

The states were given federal money to build their state ACA programs... so the government already owns it.

Now, imagine if they had been forced to open source this stuff, at least between the contractors.

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