The One Disheartening Number That Suggests Healthcare.gov Will Not Be Fixed Anytime Soon

We all know by now that healthcare.gov is an utter mess. The next question: How long will it take to fix?

The New York Times this weekend had a pretty dispiriting answer:

Administration officials approached the contractors last week to see if they could perform the necessary repairs and reboot the system by Nov. 1. However, that goal struck many contractors as unrealistic, at least for major components of the system. Some specialists working on the project said the online system required such extensive repairs that it might not operate smoothly until after the Dec. 15 deadline for people to sign up for coverage starting in January, although that view is not universally shared.

That sounds bad already. But then there was this head-turner: “One specialist said that as many as five million lines of software code may need to be rewritten before the Web site runs properly.”