While it is the parents of students that have to deal with the mess that is healthcare.gov (Obamacare), the private sector has its own equivalent -- a.k.a. the Common Application (http://www.commonapp.org) - that is affecting the students' college applications. From the Slate article titled "Because the College Application Process Just Wasn’t Stressful Enough" (http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2013/11/common_app_problems_a_meltdown_worthy_of_healthcare_gov.html):
"Created to facilitate reusing data and admissions materials across multiple college applications, this year’s Common Application, which services 517 colleges and universities, has become a technological fiasco thanks to the interaction of two famously inefficient parts of the (mostly) private sector: programming contractors and educational administration. They came together in the form of the nonprofit membership association Common Application Inc."