[joe_the_user]

Has anyone noted that the government perhaps just shouldn't be in this kind of business to begin with?

Any market based solution website has to be very agile and responsive [edit: to succeed at it's goal] but the government can't be super responsive and in many ways shouldn't be super responsive. The state spends all of our money and enforces mandatory decisions concerning our lives. The state shouldn't have the agile qualities needed to produce the beautifully flexible websites created by the private sector.

In general, I'd claim the state should certainly be smaller but that it shouldn't be less bureaucratic, shouldn't be more like a corporation. Civil service is boring and bureaucratic by design, specifically it was created to combat the "spoils system" that plagued the early American state [1] (though the prize of modern state eclipse what Tammany Hall etc could have imagined). Modern corporations are agile by having a command structure which lets them quickly maximize profits - which is great if we believe the market system benefits everyone when operating properly. But states with the ability to trample the fences of ordinary market shouldn't not be also given the ability to move quickly and agilely to do this. Corporations have no internal limits to their "greed" but we citizens of democratic market capitalism are assuming that's OK, indeed desirable, as long as the corporation face the strong external limit of markets and individual choice.

The current fashion for what could be called "state-enforced private consumption" is sold as giving us the best of all possible worlds but in reality gives us the worst (IE. the reality is the wealth of this society is indeed being vacuum-out by a kind of private-public rent seeker limited by neither the traditional bounds of the democratic state or traditional bounds of the market).

Note: I'm not a conservative rooting against Obamacare. It seems like it was a terrible approach for achieving affordable healthcare but I still would prefer it succeeded that failed because, well, I and many friends need it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system

[njharman]

> Any market based solution website has to very agile and responsive

This is provably false by visiting any number of old, large company websites, esp in healthcare or banking. In addition the government isn't in this kind of business, it outsources almost everything to "free market" companies, who extract as much margin as they and their lobbyists can get away with.

Complexity has much more to do with size of and number of evolved entities than whether they are profit motivated or not.

[john_b]

Large companies in well established industries sometimes operate with near monopoly power and are only threatened when the entire industry undergoes a long term, permanent change. Most people don't consider such a situation a functioning, healthy market. Healthcare and banking are two great examples of industries whose dynamics tend to result in a small number of powerful entities calling the shots, the former due to legal reasons and the latter due to economies of scale.

[Spooky23]

Bad software development processes are everywhere. I've seen more than one successful companies that aren't massive corporations futz around and produce garbage. I've also seen highly effective government organizations produce some awesome product.

[hga]

While I wouldn't call it "awesome" (bit too clunky for that), the Medicare.gov site that CGI Federal is responsible for (don't know if they built it or the recent Plan D shopping and enrollment part) is pretty good, very solid and gets the job done.

[joe_the_user]

I should make have said something like "need to be ... to succeed". That many "market" sites aren't agile isn't the point, the point is that to be useful for the purpose of impelling lower prices for consumers, the Obamacare website needs to be agile. To the extent it isn't agile, it won't be helping it's cause.

[roin]

I'll second this one, I spent five years at a major consulting company working in large banks and insurance companies, and there was NOTHING agile about development.