I've worked on two roughly similar but much smaller projects, one of them with an AS/400 admin who had to be sent documentation on what JSON is (he was "familia

I've worked on two roughly similar but much smaller projects, one of them with an AS/400 admin who had to be sent documentation on what JSON is (he was "familiar with" XML but hadn't used it before), and another working through a middleman company which had built a reasonably sane API to query a small subset of the offerings of several insurance companies across a particular set of states. Both projects were a huge pain in the ass, and neither of them even required testing for eligibility. When I think of healthcare.gov, I think of that same pain in the ass multiplied by the large number of states and additional insurance companies involved... as well as testing for eligibility, doing income validation, calculating subsidies... probably some state-by-state regulatory requirements... just the sheer number of external organizations and systems involved boggles the mind. Frankly, I'm shocked it works even to the extent it does. Incidentally, the complexity involved in building a site like this for so much of the country is why the ACA was set up for every state to implement their own exchange. Unfortunately, a lot of states didn't pull their weight and now it's the feds' mess to clean up.