Reuters

Observers could reasonably dismiss the earliest reports of Obamacare website failures. Multiple glitches at launch aren't ideal, but they happen to even successful projects. So long as the overall effort was competently run, there was no reason to panic: If most everything was as it should've been, fixes could've been made quickly.

But Obamacare wasn't competently run.

It's too early to know exactly what is wrong or how long it will take to fix. But the latest reporting on rollout problems reveals that they're "the result of gross negligence, ignorance, and the violation of engineering best practices at just about every step of the way," as Dan Hanson persuasively argues at Marginal Revolution.

The details reported in the New York Times are embarrassing, this one in particular: "It went live on Oct. 1 before the government and contractors had fully tested the complete system." The newspaper says that "disarray has distinguished the project," and that a key responsibility was given to unqualified personnel:

... the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency in charge of the exchange, is responsible for making sure that the separately designed databases and pieces of software from 55 contractors work together. It is not common for a federal agency to assume that role, and numerous people involved in the project said the agency did not have the expertise to do the job and did not fully understand what it entailed.

Experts consulted about how long it might take to fix the website and related computer systems couldn't agree on a timeframe. This PBS segment is informative:

Elsewhere, some software experts say it would be better to start from scratch, and others are warning about information-security flaws in a site that's been a rush job.