HealthCare.Gov Was Originally Built In A Garage

You  may be surprised to learn that when you arrive at HealthCare.Gov the first page you see on the Web site was not built in a bland office park somewhere in Virginia. It was built in the District of Columbia. By a team of 12 engineers. Their offices are in a garage, and they wanted to use the site to buy themselves health insurance in 2014.

Really.

Before large contractors took over, a small firm called Development Seed laid much of the groundwork for the site that millions of Americans are trying to access today. It spent four months, starting in March, as a government sub-contractor, building the version of HealthCare.Gov that launched in June. Their work remains the home page of the newly launched Web site.

Development Seed is by no means the entire force behind the massive Web site. A bigger company, CGI Federal, developed the back-end functions where people create accounts and find out if they're eligible for coverage. CGI has declined requests for comment.