Was that specialist in the running for being paid to fix it, and thus was overinflating the estimate so he could get paid a few hundred million to fix it up?
I like the idea of a government healthcare program, I really do. But this website... man, someone lined their pockets on this scam, big time.
Unless you want to posit that the contracts were accepted by companies that knew it could not be delivered in the time required. And even then, people are optimistic, and I strongly suspect they didn't think HHS/CMMS would be so insane about the number of changes demanded during the process, going all the way through the week before launch (!!!).
One specialist said that as many as five million lines of software code may need to be rewritten before the Web site runs properly.
It sounds like they've been doing a little too much coding and not enough designing.