When Barack Obama Complains about the Government

Obama’s extraordinary mea culpa yesterday on the health care reform “train wreck” barely acknowledged one aspect: the president’s explanation for the failure of the Healthcare.gov website, which was designed to help Americans sign up for a new medical insurance policy.

We know that only 106,000 individuals signed up for this insurance over the course of six weeks, of which only 27,000 joined through the website. In the beginning, the blame was placed on computer bugs. It was revealed that the problem was structural — and the Republicans have succeeded in showing that the green light was given for its launch on Oct. 1, after experts had already warned that the site was not ready.

With Healthcare.gov having become the face of the reform, the technique has become engulfed in politics. Instead of leaving potential clients free to guide themselves through the site (the “same way you shop for a TV on Amazon,” Obama promised), those in charge of it imposed a barrier: Customers first needed to sign up and enter financial data. Obama’s administration believed that visitors were put off by the cost of the insurance policies, without having first evaluated the number of subsidies which they could be entitled to after the reform. This obligation to enter their personal data — and the necessary verification process — rendered the process extremely challenging.

For Barack Obama, this technological failure is particularly vexing. He won the 2012 election thanks to a campaign tool worthy of Silicon Valley, but finds himself stricken that the health care exchange’s website has not been fixed. Televisions are no longer talking about Obamacare … It’s like in 2010, at the time of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, when the country, in the firing line, waited for the oil to stop flowing. Today, like yesterday, Obama is continually under pressure to stop what is seen as an insult to national spirit: How can a technical problem get the better of the best American engineers?

During his press conference on Thursday, the president reminded himself that his campaign team had done “a pretty darn good job” when it came to 2008 and 2012 and working with “folks on technology and IT.” But the government has other “cumbersome, complicated and outdated” rules, he lamented.

“On my campaign, I could simply say, who are the best folks out there, let’s get them around a table, let’s figure out what we’re doing and we’re just going to continue to improve it and refine it and work on our goals … If you’re doing it at the federal government level, you know, you’re going through, you know, 40 pages of specs and this and that and the other and there’s all kinds of law involved. And it makes it more difficult — it’s part of the reason why chronically federal IT programs are over budget, behind schedule.”

He added in a last mea culpa: “When I think about what I would have done differently, this is one of the things. Since I know that the federal government isn’t good at this sort of thing, we should have done more so as to change this behavior.”*

The federal government’s fault — the Republicans couldn’t have said it better.

PS: The IT breakdown is also the opportunity for Americans to become aware of the number of “glitches” that weigh down their life. In The Washington Post, a reader explained that she was irritated every day by a large number of “bugs”: inadequate updates on work IT systems, inaccessible information on the pensions site, the frozen registration page on the girl scouts’ site…

[This is] without mentioning the problem of the site Commonapp.org, the current most viewed site by young people. While uninsured Americans suffer over Healthcare.gov, their children are pained over the site which allows over a million high school students to upload their application for 500 of the biggest colleges. Because of technical problems, the deadlines have had to be pushed back.

*Editor’s Note: This quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.