Memo To President Obama: Healthcare.Gov Is More Than Just A Website

[Commentary] In explaining the Administration’s implementation of the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama sought to put the botched website in some perspective: “We did not wage this long contentious battle just around a website,” he noted. “That’s not what this was about.”

Maybe so, but HealthCare.gov isn’t just a website. It’s the public face of this Administration’s signature legislative achievement. If this is how they execute their top priorities, what's going on with lesser programs? That only 0.04 percent of visitors to the website during week one were likely able to sign up for insurance says more about the complexity of large federal technology projects (and the hubris of officials intent on rolling out the website before it was ready) than it does about the merits of the Affordable Care Act. Among other things, the dysfunctional acquisition system that has for years stymied feds and contractors alike created a raw deal for the public. "This [website] is something that has to talk to a lot of different federal systems -- legacy databases," former White House innovation fellow and entrepreneur Clay Johnson told Bloomberg TV. The "lack of technical leadership at HHS" and a broken procurement system contributed to the website's failures, he said.