So why is it that the technology available to Mr. Obama as president doesn’t compare to the technology he used to win an election? Much of the problem has to do with the way the government buys things. The government has to follow a code called the Federal Acquisition Regulation, which is more than 1,800 pages of legalese that all but ensure that the companies that win government contracts, like the ones put out to build HealthCare.gov, are those that can navigate the regulations best, but not necessarily do the best job. That’s evidenced by yesterday’s Congressional testimony by the largest of the vendors, CGI Federal, which blamed everyone but itself when asked to explain the botched rollout of the new Web site. (Source)
I think this kind of problem is inherent to government, including state and local governments. It's very difficult to find the best vendors because because of interest politics and graft, and the regulations developed to prevent graft, which when worked around spawn more regulations, and so on. It's an ecosystem of red-tape complexity that breeds more complexity and with it turgid inefficiency. The expectation that this would be anything other than a mess was always silly. So what? Sooner or later they'll work it out. A year from now, no one will care.
The political process almost always makes the optimal solution an impossibility. There would have been no problem, of course, had Obamacare simply used the Medicare infrastructure in a single-payer system that the uninsured could opt into. But that would never happen because conservatives fear it would be too successful. And so the silly politics led us to adopt this unnecessarily complex system that becomes a parody of government inefficiency that would be a challenge for the meanest, cleanest tech company to coordinate effectively.
This mess is business as usual, and so one of the things I find rather annoying is the way Liberal media types are so upset about this. It's as if they feel they must show their moral superiority to conservatives by criticizing someone on their team. Conservatives who would never criticize their own. But of course in doing so Liberals reinforce the distorting conservative narrative that government can do nothing right: Even Liberals think that Obamacare is a mess."
Government can do a lot right, but it can only do it rather messily. The price paid is worth it for the benefits received. I'm with Joan Walsh here. Liberals should get off their high horse and recognize that they are belaboring the obvious and that their outrage is misplaced.