Having survived the biotech and similarly timed dot-com bubble burst in the Silicon Valley, and of course being the daughter of a stock broker, I know a few things about the stock market and what we all know as IPO’s (Initial Public Offerings). For those of you who are blissfully unaware of the term ending the last sentence it refers to the first time that a stock is offered on the public exchange-be it the NASDAQ (where most tech stocks trade) or the NYSE (where the old blue chips like WalMart and Coca-Cola trade). When a company files an IPO they are hoping to raise money, or funding, for their business through the sale of public shares. Any kind of poor publicity, or poor performance of the company’s product on the day of their IPO has a detrimental effect on the pricing of the stock, and therefore on the amount of money that can be raised via the IPO. Remember the Facebook IPO a couple of months ago? What a disaster!

Had many of the Healthcare exchanges that are the public face of Obamacare (aka the Affordable Care Act-*snort*) that premiered this past Tuesday been a product launched by a company offering an IPO on the same day, the IPO would likely have been pulled. Why you ask? Generally complete non-performance of a much anticipated and lauded product is frowned upon in the business world. How bad was it you ask? According to an article on Forbes.com as of 10/2 there were 77 “glitchy” exchanges (including Massachusetts and Utah-who had been running their exchanges prior to the enactment of Obamacare) and a stunning seven were functional.

How did this happen?

Well, dear reader, this is what happens when government takes anything over-they cede responsibility for any lack of functionality or responsibility for cost. Many states could not begin to understand the complexity of this kind of project-frankly many IT professionals can tell you that even they have a hard time grasping it. We are talking about smoothly writing code from scratch that would enable multiple types of databases to communicate flawlessly through a glossy user interface. Even as a seasoned project manager, I can tell you that the cost of finding reliable and talented coders (programers) alone would be staggering. Never mind the added cost of constant scope changes to these projects-inevitable when one is travelling in uncharted waters. I tell you, even Silicon Valley’s best would have had a hard time pulling this feat off smoothly.

Because it is the government, of course, they are subject to receiving “best customer” pricing-also known as rock bottom pricing on their bids from private businesses. This is the standing rule for those companies who bid on all government projects, and I can tell you from experience in this arena you get what you pay for-thus the glitchy, pathetic excuses for websites that had a failure to launch on Tuesday.

In Oregon you still cannot enroll in a plan online, the site merely refers you to brokers or asks you to call a customer service representative. This means that Cover Oregon is even more expensive then they wanted it to be-someone has to pay those brokers a commission, or pay the customer service reps to answer those calls and fill out all those forms. Since it is government owned-guess who is footing that bill?? Yes, that is right, the taxpayers.

From a public relations perspective, I can tell you that I am very glad not to be in that area of Cover Oregon right now. Of course, I cannot testify to the professionalism of the “spokesman” since when I saw him on the local news on Tuesday afternoon the poor chap looked rather like a deer in the headlights of an on coming semi who knows his number is up. I would guess he is about one year out of college and may flee the workaday world to return to the safer umbrella of academe after his recent experience.

Well, dear reader, I tried. Really I did. I told every person who would listen to me about the horrors of socialized medicine that I suffered as a child when my father was in the U.S. Army. The time that an ear, nose and throat specialist cut a cyst out of my ear without any painkillers-two line backer sized orderlies had escorted my screaming mother into another room, while two more line backer sized orderlies held me down. I told them about the two times that my mother’s ear drum had burst because the Army doc had told her that he needed all the antibiotics he had to treat clap in the troops so her ear would just have to “resolve itself”. Unfortunately, for all of us, no one listened. And here we are, glitchy exchanges sites and all, watching our government put lipstick on a giant pig and scramble to spend more of our money to build something private industry would have taken years to produce.

If only the Fed weren’t pumping billions into Wall Street, perhaps then it would have given the Obamacare “IPO” what it truly deserves-the finger.