I'll rebut with: we are talking about people's HEALTH CARE. Kinda important, yes?
Of course. It depends on what the current status of the "site" is. And I don't know the answer.
However, that's not quite the gist of what I'm saying.
Take any new thing. An e-cig. A car. A computer. Or a computer system. There's only so much alpha and beta testing you can do. You can come up with a lot of test cases. And I admit it sounds like they are not even passing their base-case tests.
However, you have to roll it out sometime. And when you do, you will find all the "gotcha's"... but not until you do. So you test as best you can but that's not a guarantee. In today's IT (a bit different than the "old" days I admit) they tend toward a revise/refine/revise/refine iterative development approach. That's not to say they should roll it out before it's time.
It's just that there's 10 million people x 50 states x Y
insurance company systems x how many combinations of systems and browsers x Unique health situations X Federal reporting systems .....combination of tests.
That's why they should roll it out group-of-states at a time, adding more every week for the next 8 weeks, say.
They are running late for sure. Better they had been close to ready in July and started a roll out.
Who knows? Maybe it's more uniformly standardized and distributed than I think. They do appear to be up against the wall on this. But I'll bet it varies by state. (probably 50 different state sub-systems or something...
insurance rules vary by state. IDK the design either. Maybe it just kicks you over to some insurance company's system after listing basic options. Then it's even more fun. How does the back-end reporting work? etc.)
The general rule is: test everything, fix stuff, re-test everything, fix stuff, re-test everything, fix stuff..... how big a job that is and how fast you can do it depends on the system and the tools and the resources and the rules.
Like I said...they're late. But IDK how late. It may be that you could just call ______ insurance corp and request a policy over the phone and be signed up for ACA by Jan 1. It's their problem not yours. If they write you a policy, you have a policy.
This ACA.gov thing is just a front end to shopping...like google shopping. You still end up at a vendor's site eventually. So maybe it's like that. IDK.
The real question is... are the companies ready and is the Fed ready? And what requirements are in place if any?
