HC.Gov: 33 Different Companies + $800 Million = Recipe for (near) Disaster

For any tech geeks like me out there curious as to how the original HC.gov website mess happened, this gives you an idea of how crazy the project became...

Healthcare.gov faltered last fall in large part because it was built by a crowd of uncoordinated contractors with no one in charge of making sure all the interlocking pieces fit together.

As the White House tries to prevent a repeat catastrophe, government watchdogs are investigating why the Obamacare marketplace failed in the two months after it opened on Oct. 1, 2013. A new report (PDF) details the 60 separate government contracts, awarded to 33 companies, that contributed to building healthcare.gov. The chart above shows how much each contractor was awarded."

Of course, the Obama Administration also sent in an "Apollo 13" emergency tech wizard team to clean up the mess and salvage the project in November, and the rest is history, but it's still important to understand how the federal exchange came so close to failure in the first place...