Federal Health Site Stymied by Lack of Direction

A team of young policy experts energized by President Barack Obama's health law toiled for three years in a Bethesda (MD) office building to draw up specifications for the federally run insurance marketplace. Forty miles away at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' Baltimore headquarters, longtime agency computer experts with different bosses oversaw building the site's software and hardware components. And in Washington, White House advisers worked to preserve the law through treacherous politics, sometimes stalling final decisions about the site, HealthCare.gov, to avoid controversy ahead of the 2012 presidential election.

As it becomes clear that no single leader oversaw implementation of the health law's signature online marketplace -- a complex software project that would have been difficult under the best circumstances -- the accounts of more than a dozen current and former officials show how a disjointed bureaucracy led to the site's disastrous Oct. 1 launch.