Healthcare.gov, the home of the federal insurance marketplace, has faced nothing but problems since it launched on Oct. 1. ProPublica’s Charlie Ornstein has chronicled the range of issues that have plagued the site, including duplicate enrollments and children reported as parents, as well as a wildly misleading price estimator tool.

How did we end up in this mess?

Ornstein joins ProPublica’s Editor-in-Chief Steve Engelberg on the podcast to discuss the many challenges Healthcare.gov has been up against since the Affordable Care Act was first passed in 2010; how, if the site’s glitches aren’t fixed soon, it could face a so-called “death spiral”; and the government’s decision to move forward with the site launch even though it knew there were problems:

“...the administration was out there loudly proclaiming, go to Healthcare.gov. It’s open for business. Sign up for coverage. Lady Gaga tweeted it...but the infrastructure to get covered wasn’t working,” Ornstein says. “They were directing millions of people to a website that was completely incapable of handling the traffic.”

You can listen to this podcast on iTunes and Stitcher. And for more on Healthcare.gov, read Ornstein’s latest reports:

• Today’s Obamacare Hearing: What You Need To Know
• Here’s Why Healthcare.gov Broke Down
• How the Feds Could Fix Their Glitchy Health Care Exchange
• Healthcare.gov’s Users Speak Out: ‘Clean This Mess Up’
• The Affordable Care Act’s Most Important Date: Not What You Think
• How the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza Became a Mistaken Poster Boy for Obamacare