More takers for one-way trip to Mars than for Obamacare, and one state spending $12,000 so far to attract each new insurance customer: Is this the worst launch ever?

'Mars One' colony project has 200,000 commitments from would-be space cadets, outpacing Americans' interest in Affordable Care Act participation

Vermont has enrolled just 712 people after spending $9 million on outreach, advertising and other PR ventures

One MSNBC host best known for explaining away a series of racy 'naughty Santa' photos now says it's her past work for the company behind the Obamacare website that she finds embarrassing

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius made time for a Comedy Central interview but won't accept an invitation to testify before Congress

Healthcare.gov was tested just 1 week before its launch date, after the Obama administration spent $394 MILLION building it and other Obamacare websites

The top contractor has been paid more than $200 million despite being fired by a Canadian province for botching its medical records database



House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is certain the Obamacare website's tech problems won't affect the sustainability of the Affordable Care Act, but very few in Washington are stepping up to second her motion

A startup venture recruiting people for a one-way, 43 million mile trip to live on Mars has generated more signatures than all the Obamacare health insurance plans combined.



Just 712 people in Vermont have enrolled in the state's new health insurance exchange, despite $9 million in outreach, advertising and other PR expenses paid for by the federal government.

The entire state of Alaska has yet to register a single person, according to Sen. Lisa Murkowski .

('Juneau how many people have signed up?' asks one cheeky blogger . 'Hint: It's a round number!')

A CNN medical correspondent has found that the online Obamacare system, which was reportedly first tested just days before its Oct. 1 launch, is now spontaneously deleting some Americans' passwords.

The website itself, according to The Weekly Standard , includes pilfered source code but excludes a required copyright notice required by its author.



With $394 million in contracts in the rear-view mirror, the Obama administration has an online white elephant on its hands that hasn't worked as advertised.



Krystal Ball, an MSNBC commentator best known for a series of racy 'naughty Santa' photos that circled the Internet in 2010, confessed on Thursday that she was 'embarrassed to admit' she once worked for the company that created the federal government's Obamacare website.

Is the Affordable Care Act officially the most dysfunctional and disaster-prone launch in history?

Congress, which suddenly has time on its hands after weeks of shutdown and debt-Armageddon liars poker, is about to ask some tough questions.



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Want to go to Mars? More than 200,000 people have committed to blasting off and leaving Earth behind -- a larger number than have been willing to roll the dice on Obamacare

Welcome to the disaster: Healthcare.gov is more than three years and $394 million in the making, but few Americans have been able to make it function, leaving a trail of discouraged consumers in its wake

Twitter erupted Thursday with jokes about a launch of a different kind, the Mars One colony project that has attracted 202,586 applications from people eager to depart Earth for the red planet at the first opportunity.

And in the blue corner sits Obamacare, the much-ballyhooed health-care-for-all project whose official numbers are a closely guarded state secret. But unofficial numbers from firms that track the data independently suggest that the nationwide total is somewhere south of the Mars colony's successes.

The online analytics firm Compete.com released an analysis this week that determined just 36,000 people registered for Obamacare through the federal government's Healthcare.gov website during its first week of operation. (Sources inside the Department of Health and Human Services put that number at 51,000 when they spoke with MailOnline.)

And the 14 states that run their own enrollment websites – 15 if the District of Columbia is included – are slowly adding their own figures to the total.



The Advisory Board Company, a consultancy whose influential Daily Briefing has provided day-to-day totals, puts that number at 42,000 – although critics point out that it's incomplete. Only a few states have published their own totals, and most of those announcements have been full of qualifications and caveats.

The Associated Press learned Wednesday that HHS anticipated signing up 500,000 Americans per month, beginning in October, although the agency has denied that project, articulated in a departmental memorandum, was a hard target.



President Obama is 'not happy' with the rollout, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Thursday in what might be the understatement of the week

Vermont's health insurance exchange has corralled just 712 new customers, despite $9 million in PR and outreach expenses designed to attract taxpayers to the new system

Maryland, for instance, a state of 5.88 million people, had processed 1,121 applications as of Oct. 11. Minnesota's program claims to represent 11,684 people, but that's only after factoring in ' family members, children and other dependents' of the actual applicants.



New York (100,000), Washington (25,000) and Kentucky (13,000) have reported their numbers in a similar fashion, announcing how many people will benefit from newly contracted coverage instead of how many completed applications have been filed. Families of four, for instance, would inflate those numbers by 400 per cent.



Still-larger states like California are not publishing definitive numbers at all, instead tweeting web-traffic totals and the number of applications its residents have 'started.'

Vermont, with 712 successful Obamacare enrollees as of Thursday, according to WCAX-TV , has another problem to contend with: Its website can accept applications, but it's not capable of collecting any payments.



Gov. Peter Shumlin, the Vermont Health Connect program's biggest cheerleader, hasn't addressed the possibility that even those few Vermonters will change their minds when the bill comes due.

Slow-walking: President Obama hasn't mentioned his signature legislative achievement since the debt-limit debate reached its crescendo, preferring to look forward to immigration and farm-bill fights instead

Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin is one of several Democratic pols who were ubiquitous in the run-up to the Obamacare launch date, but hard to find in public since the disappointing numbers started to trickle in

An embarrassed Krystal Ball made an on-air 'confession' Thursday on MSNBC, saying that she had worked for CGI Federal, the main contractor behind Obamacare's troubled main website

With the Obama administration cowering and late-night talk show hosts doing a brisk business in Obamacare jokes ('Today Obama changed his slogan from "Yes we can" to "Perhaps we could try. Can't promise anything,"' said Jay Leno), the White House is saying only that the president is 'not happy.'

And Congress, fresh from its epic debt-limit standoff, has begun to engage.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said Thursday that even if the Obamacare insurance exchanges' enrollment mechanisms continue to be failure-prone through the holidays, the program itself must be allowed to continue without delays.

'No, no – It has nothing to do with the programmatic part. It's about technology,' she insisted when asked about the impact of non-functioning websites and frustrated consumers on the public-policy part of Obamacare. The part that won and lost hundreds of elections.

But it's the technology that is making headlines now, including one at The Washington Examiner that screamed about the Department of Health and Human Services failing to road-test Healthcare.gov 'until a week before launch.'



HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius made time for Jon Stewart on Teh Daily Show, but his pointed barbs have her scrambling to avoid testifyign before Congress about the disastrous Obamacare website

'Normally a system this size would need 4-6 months of testing and performance tuning, not 4-6 days,' a source on the inside of the project said. 'The actual system requirements for Oct. 1 were changing up until the week before.'

And a former employee of CGI Federal, the company behind the website – the same firm that now has former employee and MSNBC pundit Krystal Ball 'embarrassed' – said 'requirements came late' from the bureaucrats who 'dictated the design, especially the sign-up-before-viewing-plans, and there was absolutely not enough time for testing.'

CGI's parent company was shown the door by health officials in Ontario in September 2012, after it missed deadlines in three straight years related to the province’s online medical registry.



but The Obama administration had already awarded the firm a $93.7 million contract in late 2011 to complete work on Healthcare.gov. And two years later, Reuters reports, the value of that contract has grown to almost $292 million, nearly $200 million of which has already been paid.

All told, according to a Government Accountability Office report published in June, the administration doled out $394 million to dozens of companies for work related to setting up the health care exchanges nationwide.



The House Energy and Commerce Committee will likely dig into the administration's high-tech bungling on October 24, when it convenes a hearing on the website implementation that bears the ominous title, 'Unprepared or Incompetent?'

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who said Monday on The Daily Show that she's unaware of how many Americans have enrolled in Obamacare, has told the committee that she won't testify.

' Secretary Sebelius had time for Jon Stewart, and we expect her to have time for Congress,' countered committee chairman Rep. Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican, in a statement on Thursday.

'Either the administration was not ready for launch, or it was not up to the job,' Upton said. 'The president and top officials were quick to boast the number of visitors to HealthCare.gov, but they have since gone silent, refusing to disclose even basic enrollment figures.'

'The rollout has been a complete mess, beyond the worst case scenario, and yet those administration officials responsible have indicated they will not be available to testify next week. This is wholly unacceptable.'