I'm not from the US, so don't really know why there is so much focus on the website rather than the healthcare itself in the US news. But now I'm wondering, what language is healthcare.gov written in and did they put every keyword on a new line?
As for the language/line count, I don't know what language it is but this 500 million number had to have been picked out of thin air. Perhaps they counted the number of lines of actual code and multiplied it by the number of servers it is running on.
Just adding in boost and using like 1 function from it adds 25M lines of "code" (dumbly counted including comments and such).