I've just spent 60 days in the jailhouse
For the crime of having no dough
Now here I am back out on the street
For the crime of having nowhere to go

Yankees fans did the same thing.

The best part about the resurgence in the Orioles is not having to contend with that level of invasion, and once again being able to have a home game on and, from the other room, know that if you hear cheering, it isn't Red Sox fans or Yankee fans.

For whatever reason the administration was not ready for the 10/1 rollout.   We are so far beyond "glitches" that the use of the term has for the most part stopped.

I think the actual problem is no one really knows how bad it is.  Critics and commentators are prone to exaggeration and we're seeing that from the right and left.

At this point I'd say there's a 50/50 chance they get their act together by the end of the year.  

The real question and what no one knows is what happens when not enough young people have signed up.    Then what does the administration do.

My recommendation, not that they'll take it, is to call it quits early rather then drag out the pain through the 2014 election season.

It doesn't take a crystal ball to predict that if the administration does what it always does (deny the obvious) this could turn out poorly for the dems come election day 2014 and the shutdown will be a distant memory.

As far as the substance of the argument, my point was/is that no one "knows" what the causes of the healthcare.gov problems are, with the possible exception of the contractors and managers of the program.  I say "possible" because, while they are the only ones with detailed, firsthand knowledge of the process by which it was developed, they're still in the middle of trying to figure it out.  There are many different opinions of what's caused the problems, but the reality is it's too early to tell whether this was an oversight/management failure, a design failure by the contractors, a political failure based on the the late development of regulations (for political reasons), a specs failure, a procurement failure caused by an inflexible, antiquated procurement system, an integration failure due to an enormously complex job of integrating numerous different federal databases into a single hub, or another reason as yet undiscussed because we have no direct knowledge - or a combination of some or all of these.

No one - least of all me - is claiming that "it's possible that the problems being reported now, both on the user end and on the insurer end, are rooted or have a genesis in something other than the software or the platform or the timing or the contract specs or how much money was spent, or the management structure."  In fact, I think it's quite possible that some (or maybe even all) of those factors - or others that haven't even been discussed - played a role in why the rollout was such a failure.  In fact, I specifically mentioned those issues as possible causes when I answered the question that prompted all this:

I honestly don't know.  I don't think anyone does yet, really.  From what I've read, it may have something to do with the decision to delay the regulations until this year.  it could also be the enormous complexity of integrating dozens of large, pre-existing databases.  It might also be a huge screw-up at the contractor level and/or the managerial level.

This is where it went downhill.  To that fairly innocuous post, JB replied that he did "know" the reasons for the failure, citing McArdle's piece as his evidence and stating that he would take the word of Henry Chao over my "random interpretation" - despite the fact that Chao hasn't ever commented on the reasons for the website problems.  After that, we were off to the races with both jb and sj putting words and my mouth and hypocritically whining about blog-clogging.

Now I know you tend to get more than a little upset (rightly so) when someone (repeatedly) tries to put words in your mouth.  IIRC you've had the very same issue with jb on several occasions.  Not to mention that you have been accused on several occasions of being "unnecessarily argumentative and confrontational," or some variation thereof.  I also know you have little tolerance for condescending responses with no substance (i.e. "Not really. I get it that this isn't your field.") or amateur psychoanalysis.  Their responses had nothing to do with making people "better informed" or "exploring the whole issue".