They dodged the hardest issues and politics by piggy-backing on the actual site to obtain the data. So you cannot really say that they did what the government contractors were unable to do.

But without a doubt they eliminated all of the cruft and whittled the site down to exactly what consumers want. I want the ACA to succeed and would love to see some variation of this "quick lookup" on the official site. The government would be wise to pay it some attention.