Go figure.

of a costly exercise with no apparent oversight.

The bush admin had a pallet stacked with a billion dollars in cash stolen because of a lack of oversight and little was said. Billions of dollars worth of weapons were stolen from unguarded depots by the enemy but no congressional hearings came from it.

And as for being a miserable failure, that may be true but there's still time to fix it. I see no reason to waste more money on hearings or to demand people lose there jobs. I certainly can't understand people wanting Obama to resign over it.

You'd have thought they 'd at least have tested it under the likely pressure it would receive in the first few days.

We've had similar fuck ups in the UK with regard to IT changes in the NHS but they were folded before any harm could be done.

And I know there are problems. But that's worth an angry letter to the Des Moines Picayune Dispatch, not full blown congressional hearings and 24/7 media coverage. It's certainly not worth calls for firings and resignation.

It just seems that the response to a simple website failure is far greater than its implications.

Any idea of how much that was ?

He has been telling everybody how good it would be, and he has been trying to make the argument that some things are best done by government -- a competent, reliable government.

The roll-out isn't the end of the world, but it certainly undermines much of what Obama has been saying and comes at the worst possible time -- when we are debating the very role of government going forward.

And the reason is continues to be in the news is that there are so many apparatchiks here and elsewhere who seem to be completely incapable of acknowledging the obvious disastrous failure and then move on. It is only a continuing news item because so many people are still trying to rationalize and apologize for this, and to explain why it isn't really a huge problem.

It is what it is. The best course is to acknowledge the many problems both with the website and with the underlying ACA concept and agree to move on making the best of this moment, even though the whole program falls so far short of what any modern society should consider the minimum standard for health care.

Granted, yes, the site's buggy as an anthill, and yes, the contractor responsible needs to be held accountable.

It's embarrassing, but not fatal. Software has bugs, sometimes, they're showstoppers, but they'll get fixed.

If the only thing going wrong with the ACA is a buggy web site, I'd say we're in pretty good shape.

They could have had one site (or route) for browsing plans; getting current premiums by age; reviewing copays, networks, etc.; to mull over before applying.

Then, have another route for actually applying, proving eligibility for subsidies, etc.

As October 1 approached for the system we had, they should have come out and admitted there would likely be issues . . . . . . .but they didn't. Hoping it would work -- or taking some optimistic IT guy's belief that the next little tweak would make it work -- was a big mistake.

While conservatives point to this as a failure of government, I think it shows private companies can't perform any better with something like this.

Finally, I suspect there was a lot of dragging of feet before designing/programming this thing in earnest while we awaited the Supreme Court decision, relentless attacks by Republicans, etc. Where would we be with a multi-million dollar web-site if the ACA was delayed or even repealed (glad it wasn't).