The Health Care Website Is Not Like Facebook

When questioning executives of the contractor behind the problem-plagued health care website during a House hearing Thursday, Rep. Steve Scalise brought up a popular, user-friendly site for comparison.

"It's been reported over $500 million of taxpayer money [was] spent to build this website, more money, by the way, than it cost to build Facebook," the Republican from Louisiana said, citing a Digital Trends piece that reported the social network surpassed $500 million in spending costs six years into its existence. "Facebook gets 700 million users a day. Seven hundred people use that—million people use that site every day, and it works."

The thing is, HealthCare.gov isn't anything like Facebook. Never mind that the two serve very different purposes—the former to sign up uninsured Americans for health plans, the latter to fuel your fear of missing out. A lot more goes into the health care site than into Facebook, including 10 times as many lines of code [...].