>>First, you seem to think it's been "turned around" and is now done. It's far from "done"...

Nice, except that in real life, certain people made all sorts of Chicken Little predictions and when the sky did not fall, they just came up with another set.

Completely resolved? Nope. But people are signing up and order is being restored and credible people like the Commonwealth institute are recording general satisfaction.

>>Second, on your dollar figures - the Inspector General for HHS is now estimating the cost of healthcare.gov to be 1.7 billion, when they factor in the value of the remaining contracts.

Ahem, that 1.7B is the *original* estimated value of contracts when the whole thing began 5 years ago. Of this, $800M is the sum dedicated to development of the Marketplace and so far they've awarded $500M. Over budget? Yes. Increased scandalously to $1.7B? Wrong end of stick. That's what happens when you rely on a partisan lay synopsis.

>>Third, I'm certainly not going to exclude the original vendor as a cause of the initial problems. But when you read the published accounts of the sequence of events, it's extremely clear that HHS was put in a project management role for which they were unprepared.

While the vendors were paradigms of business excellence? LOL. Plenty of blame to go around, as I've said before.

>>This new framing of "we were rushed, we didn't have enough time" only serves to add to the credibility of the Republican argument last September that the entire mess should have been delayed a year. They can't have it both ways. Truth hurts.

The truth is that it was a shambles, and that as usual the bloatfest was resolved by a small group of competents to the point where people can sign up and those who do, mostly express satisfaction. To paraphrase Keynes: "When my information changes, I change my opinion. What do you do, Sir?"

>>And finally, on the argument that you and Mike Beane tried to make last week about majority of Americans being happy with ACA (which is completely untrue)...

Must you? As I said earlier: if you want to find out whether a restaurant is any good, surely you need to ask people who actually ate there. Focusing on those who never ate there just records prejudice, and it's far worse with the ACA when we know that satisfaction is driven by political leaning until people actually try it out. In real life, Republican voters know the ACA is no good until they sign up, whereupon a good majority is OK with it. You've lectured others before about science and stats- why the disconnect here?

>>Bottom line - there is no polling trend in the US that shows an overall favorability rating of ACA. You can certainly find specific demographics where it's more favorable, but you cannot find overall favorability ratings of any significance.

If you held a poll on the best city in the world to live in in 2014, how many of your townsfolk would say Melbourne, Australia? As I keep telling you: unless you've actually tried, people don't know what they don't know.

>>Will save the best (or worst) for last. Initial projections from the ACA architects were that ACA would cost $938 billion over a decade and would reduce the number of uninsured people by 19 million as of 2014 Then that figure was adjusted to 1.6 trillion. Then it was adjusted again this past February to just over 2 trillion.

As opposed to the private market where prices never rose? I've given you figures that price rises appear LOWER today than previously... but still the sky is going to fall.