Would you please comment on this discussion and add your thoughts if possible?

Well before looking anything up I know very little to nothing about the affordable care act. Looking at projections versus actually enrollment in the first year of it and going forward the projections are a lot higher than the actual enrollment. Leading me to believe the project may have been overvalued. An article stated that the rollout also costed about three times the original budget and was still suffering from a plethora of issues. Appearing that those managing the project updated the timelines but did not effectively change deadlines to match the project. It would seem that a lack of proper PM which failed to comprise scope or deadline caused the release to be tumultuous at best.

"Based on the analysis, the greatest amount of risk was identified in the Project Scope Management, Project Integration Management, and Project Time Management Knowledge Areas. All three states did not define the scope effectively, either including features that were not required for launch or missing functionality that was required."(1)

This exert from a study on the project exemplifies the role or lack of a role that PM played in the failure of the rollout. I would have to say no clear project layout was followed or implemented and communication seemed to be a large issue not addressed causing many of the problems. It seems to provide a good framework for the reasoning for project managements importance and why a structure or framework is important.

Reference:

1)https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/us-health-benefit-exchange-projects-9299