“An Internet facility that was supposed to deal with one-sixth of the US economy was produced without security and presented to the public without a thorough run-through.  This kind of incompetence is well beyond the norm even for the US federal government. President Obama himself nixed any possibility of extending the deadline, so obviously the timing was more important than performance. Or perhaps the excessive haste merely provided a kind of cover for the real intention, which was to produce a fatally flawed system. Perhaps the idea – as we speculated previously – is that the system is to offer evidence that quasi-market systems simply do not work. Enter single payer.”