I had to use ehealthinsurance to get a plan to cover a gap period this August. It's not beautiful, but it worked perfectly fine. I think it's proof positive that a central marketplace for healthcare could work.

The problems with Healthcare.gov are that it's a badly designed morass of barely functional independent systems that need to get data from other government departments (which probably don't even have real APIs) and requirements full of 'bureaucrat enhanced' logic.

I'm fairly confident that at some point it will be at least as dead annoying as Treasury Direct, though at least be functional.

Ultimately I don't view the idea as wrong, so much as I view major reforms of how the government uses and builds software as necessary.