$600 million down the drain.

It’s been one full week since the flagship technology portion of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) went live. And since that time, the befuddled beast that is Healthcare.gov has shutdown, crapped out, stalled, and mis-loaded so consistently that its track record for failure is challenged only by Congress.

I’m shocked! Yannow they’ve had three years to set this site up. Did they contract this out to Elbonia?

The site itself, which apparently underwent major code renovations over the weekend, still rejects user logins, fails to load drop-down menus and other crucial components for users that successfully gain entrance, and otherwise prevents uninsured Americans in the 36 states it serves from purchasing healthcare at competitive rates – Healthcare.gov’s primary purpose. The site is so busted that, as of a couple days ago, the number of people that successfully purchased healthcare through it was in the “single digits,” according to the Washington Post.

As a formally highly paid, highly trained, and highly motivated IT professional, I could have predicted this. It’s the gummint. What do you expect? To paraphrase exSpeaker Blinky: We need to put the site in production to see how fucked up it is.

The reason for this nationwide headache apparently stems from poorly written code, which buckled under the heavy influx of traffic that its engineers and administrators should have seen coming. But the fact that Healthcare.gov can’t do the one job it was built to do isn’t the most infuriating part of this debacle – it’s that we, the taxpayers, seem to have forked up more than $634 million of the federal purse to build the digital equivalent of a rock.

The update to this story sez it’s actually over $600 million. A pretty nice hunk of change for a site that crashes on a regular basis. So how much was it originally supposed to cost.

The exact cost to build Healthcare.gov and its related systems is difficult to determine due to the expansive nature of the project and the murky details in federal budgets. But based on the figures and details available, here is my best estimate of what this flawed system has cost us: The most clear data comes from a U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report from June (pdf), which states that the U.S. Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) spent “almost $394 million from fiscal year 2010 through March 2013 through contracts” to build the “federally facilitated exchanges” (FFEs) – the complex system that includes Healthcare.gov as well as certain state-based exchanges – the data hub, and other expenditures related to the Obamacare exchange system. While GAO states that the “highest volume” of that $394 million was related to the development of “information technology systems,” a more detailed look at that cost shows that a portion that $394 million was spent on things like call centers and collection services. Take that out, and you’re left with roughly $363 million spent on technology-related costs to the healthcare exchanges – the bulk of which ($88 million) went to CGI Federal, the company awarded a $93.7 million contract to build Healthcare.gov and other technology portions of the FFEs.

And the costs will continue to rise, just like all of the costs associated with Obummercare. The Affordable Car Act my ass! You Obungler supporters were sold a bill of goods by the Obamessiah and the Dimocrats. Costs will continue to rise and healthcare will continue to get worse. This website is just a symbol of the train wreck of Obummercare. Suckers!

Read the rest at the linked site. Here’s a money quote: When things still go wrong, they simply throw ‘more money at the same people who caused the problem to fix the problem.’

Why not? We continue to elect the same people who create problems to fix the problems they create.