HHS failed to heed many warnings that Healthcare.gov was in trouble

During the two years before the disastrous opening of HealthCare.gov, federal officials in charge of creating the online insurance marketplace received 18 written warnings that the mammoth project was mismanaged and off course but never considered postponing its launch, according to government investigators. The warnings included a series of 11 scathing reviews from an outside consultant — among them a top-10 list of risks drawn up in the spring of 2013 that cited inadequate planning for the website's capacity and deviations from usual IT standards. A few months before, then-Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius had hired another consultant to review the project and recommend ways to improve its management, but its advice was never shared with the technical staff working on the website.