I’ve never been a fan of the ACA, but it would be foolish for me to suggest that the bungled rollout is enough to justify my position. A website can be fixed, and there’s nothing in the gargantuan legislation that mandates the site be a crash-prone monstrosity. The failures in the first few weeks of Obamacare suggest much more about the weaknesses of the Administration than the law itself.
Though the website had been under construction for years, it is clear that the job was mishandled. The site was never stress-tested, and initially crashed if more than 1,100 people attempted to use it. A thorough security examination to ensure consumers’ sensitive personal data would be kept safe was never performed on the final release version of the site, and it is not immediately clear the site was ready to go live on October 1. Obviously, none of these specific tasks were Kathleen Sebelius’s job, but monitoring to ensure the process was proceeding on schedule was. That no one was prepared to delay the website’s release over these problems indicates that either no one with the contractor was keeping the Administration in the loop—which would be a failure in the Administration’s judgment in picking a contractor—or no one in the Administration thought to keep track of the progress of the most publicly visible aspect of the ACA.
The failure of the Healthcare.gov rollout is a failure of oversight. Like so many other times in this administration, it seems like the President only learned there was a problem after he saw it on the news. Either he knew about these problems—like he knew that a huge number of customers in the individual insurance market would lose their plans due to regulatory language that his administration wrote—and pretended they did not exist and/or misled the American people, or he really is as naively aloof as his “I didn’t know” defense suggests. Given the enormity of the decisions regularly placed before the leader of the free world, neither possibility is particularly reassuring.