Anatomy of the Obamacare exchange debacle *UPDATED*

We know that the know that the Obamacare exchange has a bass ackwards design that forces people to turn over all of their private information before they can even begin shopping.  We know that its complexity is intended to hide as much as possible the fact that people with middle class incomes are paying through the wazoo to subsidize with lower incomes.  We know that Obamacare supporters are telling their audience to work less hard so as to qualify for more subsidies (apparently unaware that, when enough people start working less hard, the subsidies go unfunded.  We know that even Obamabots are starting to realize that they are not getting what they were sold.  They were promised lower premiums, they were promised that they could keep their insurance, and they were promised that they could keep their doctor.  Everyone of those promises was a lie — and the administration knew it was a lie when it made the promises.

What we also know, of course, is that, despite three-and-a-half years and tens of millions of dollars, the system as designed has been a complete and utter failure.  Leftists try to explain that failure away by saying that so many people tried to get on that naturally the system crashed.  The system, they say, was a victim of its own success.  But by any website metric — Drudge, HuffPo, Daily Mail, etc. — a pathetically small number of people tried to get on and, of that number, few got any further than nowhere.  Those who were able to plow a little ways into the system discovered that vast chunks of data were simply missing.  There were unpopulated pull down menus, random codes, etc.

AJ Strata, who is a career systems analyst, took a good long look at the Obamacare exchange system (or as much look as he could manage without specs) and explains that the programming system is deeply flawed at every level.  It’s well worth reading in order to understand how a dreadful law, plus dreadful executive action, resulted in a costly white elephant with long-term negative ramifications.

UPDATE:  And it only needed this:  stolen code.