Web brokers that signed agreements with the administration to offer subsidized Obamacare plans on their websites have been unable to connect to the federal system. Federal health officials say they’re working to bring the e-brokers in, but the brokers say communication has been virtually nonexistent.

“[Fixing HealthCare.gov] is obviously a priority over getting their interface ready to go, but the Web brokers — like other stakeholders — aren’t really getting any info from HHS either,” said Venable attorney Chris Condeluci, who’s working with Web brokers.

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Facing such intense opposition from congressional Republicans, the administration was in a bunker mentality as it built the enrollment system, one former administration official said. Officials feared that if they called on outsiders to help with the technical details of how to run a commerce website, those companies could be subpoenaed by Hill Republicans, the former aide said. So the task fell to trusted campaign tech experts.

Even as early as 2010, HealthCare.gov was bug-ridden, a harbinger of problems to come. But few read the tea leaves because the site had a small fraction of the traffic it would get in October 2013.

“The wheels were practically coming off the wagon at that point, which should have been a clue that anything more than this — a nicely branded site with a lot of information and not much interactivity — was going to be impossible,” the former official said.

Former Obama administration Medicare and Medicaid chief Don Berwick told POLITICO that the early implementation years were marked by a shortage of funds. “The total implementation budget for Obamacare in the first two years, as I recall, was something in the order of $1 billion. The resources were spread quite thin and it was not possible at that time to get more resources from Congress,” he said. “We really wished there were more. The money wasn’t there.”

Berwick called the problems “troublesome but expected” and predicted they would not matter so much in a few months, as Obamacare takes root.

“This isn’t a one-year, one-week, one-day trajectory. We’re trying to make health care a human right. I’m taking a longer view here,” he said. “I wish it had been better now, but I think this’ll soon be a memory.”

So far, most insurers have been keeping their frustrations with HealthCare.gov to themselves.

“The reality is there’s nothing you can say to a reporter in October that’s going to make CMS work that much harder to fix it,” said one insurer on condition of anonymity.

But the source warned that could change if tech problems start tarnishing insurers’ brands. They worry about someone with an insurance card getting denied at a doctor’s office in January because the back-end technology on the federal site isn’t working.

“At that point, the [customer] will blame the company, not HealthCare.gov,” the source said.

Lobbyists and health industry stakeholders are increasingly vocal about the meltdown, many of the states running their own enrollment system are faring better than the federal operation and the Obama administration’s cheerleaders aren’t waving their pom-poms so vigorously for now. Even some liberal commentators and White House allies who seemed willing to give the administration a long leash have been dismayed by reports of poorly written code, malfunctioning hardware and downright mismanagement.

For now, the failure has mostly been a PR nightmare for the administration. But it has the potential to cascade into a crisis for real people if challenges continue too long.

Some industry officials point to Nov. 1 as a potential test for the system. That’s the day when the federal exchange is due to transfer thousands of Medicaid applications to state agencies.

“If the marketplace isn’t working well by the first part of November, I think people are going to start raising major concerns,” said Bobby Peterson, executive director of the Madison-based ABC for Health.

In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker’s Obamacare plan will move about 90,000 Medicaid beneficiaries onto private, subsidized coverage through HealthCare.gov. Medicaid coverage for those people is set to expire Dec. 31, and advocates are worried about whether some won’t be able to make the coverage switch in time for Jan. 1.

In general, Americans have until the end of March to enroll in a 2014 Obamacare plan, but to avoid a tax penalty, they’ll have to sign up by mid-February. This quirk, unearthed by industry observers, appears to have gone previously unnoticed by the administration.

“The IRS didn’t know that,” said Jackson Hewitt Vice President Brian Haile, who recently brought the issue to the administration’s attention.

Haile says the administration could choose to relax enforcement of the individual mandate to get coverage, which is already viewed as weak in its first year — $95 or 1 percent of a person’s income, whichever is higher. Other changes could also come — but the administration isn’t talking much about what it’s going to change tomorrow, let alone a few months from now.

David Nather contributed to this report.