These days there are PLENTY of govt IT fiascos, though there’s usually a contractor behind the mess. They also don’t attract the mainstream ire the way healthcare.gov did. The biggest example that jumps to mind is the VA’s botched rollout of the Cerner/Oracle platform. Plenty of angry congressmen but not headline news outside the DMV (DC, MD, VA).
"Development of the website's interface as well as its supporting back-end services, to make sure that the website could work to help people compare between health insurance plans, were both outsourced to private companies. The front-end of the website was developed by the startup Development Seed.[2] The back-end work was contracted out to CGI Federal Inc., a subsidiary of the Canadian IT Multinational corporation| CGI Group, which subcontracted the work to other companies, as is common on large government contracts.[11] CGI was also responsible for building some of the state-level healthcare exchanges, with varying levels of success (some did not open on schedule).[9]"
CGI is the company that was the focus of the blame at the time.
However, one of the primary reasons is had such a rough start was because FAR too many people were channelled into it.
The individual states were supposed to set up their own systems that the Federal system would reimburse and channel people into. Places like California did so--and the experience was quite decent. The problem, of course, was the all the Red states refusing to set up a system and all their citizens wound up in the healthcare.gov system.
Of course, the major problem with healthcare.gov was the same problem as with all government contracts--outsourcing. All contractors basically play "chicken" with the government--they take all the money they can up front and do as little work as they can until the very last moment. If they get really lucky, the program gets cancelled and they get to keep all the money having done no work. Normally, they get yelled at at some point and have to put in work while the schedule slips and slips.
Occasionally, though, they wind up with a contract that they didn't do jack on that had a real deadline and the contractor winds up with egg on their face. This was healthcare.gov.