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The Obama Administration’s Healthcare.gov back-end will not be completed until after the President leaves office, according to comments made by the website’s CEO yesterday. Despite starting construction on the website back in 2011 and pouring billions into the project, key structural problems remain. As Politico reported yesterday:

“The ‘back end’ of the Obamacare website still isn’t properly wired to the health insurance companies. It’s slow going for health plans to make sure the 11.4 million people who have signed up end up in the right plan.”

Taxpayers should be alarmed that so much work remains to be a done on a website that was supposed to have been completed by November 2013. The exchange is closing in on the end of its second enrollment period, and yet the website remains unfinished. 

In fact, as of May 2014, the administration had spent almost $2.7 billion on the construction of Healthcare.gov alone. When federal subsidies for state-run exchanges are factored in, the federal government has spent almost $7.4 billion on construction of Obamacare websites for the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Despite this spending spree, key features of the website remain uncompleted, and taxpayers that have signed up for Obamacare will have difficulty navigating the website to ensure they comply with the laws many complex regulations. As the Politico article states:

“Subsidy payments aren’t automated, so the insurers get payments based on estimates. And adding information like a marriage or the birth of a child is a convoluted, multi-step process. … Instead of a swift process, health plans use clunky workarounds and manual spreadsheets. It takes time and it costs money.”

As if on cue, it was revealed last week that 800,000 individuals received the wrong tax information through healthcare.gov due to an “erroneous glitch.” As ATR’s Ryan Ellis noted, these 800,000 families are “literally caught in limbo until healthcare.gov gets its act together.” If the latest reports are any indication, taxpayers may be waiting a long time.