I know this is the hottest new talking point out of Think Progress, but even a Media Matters moron ought to be able to see through that one.
1. The government designed the site and brought the contractors on board. The final responsibility is theirs. If insurance companies had been told to design a website to sell insurance and spent $600 million to produce a site that crashes when 2,000 people browse it, then Henry Waxman would be right.
It would be the private sector’s fault.
But when the government blows $600 million on a site that doesn’t work, then it’s the government’s fault even though the work was done for it by private companies.
The companies may have contracted to do the work for the government, but the government “contracted” to do the work for us. Whatever the details of the screw up are, it’s still the government’s screw up.
As Harry Truman, a Democrat from the time when Democrats had hair on their chests and didn’t use teleprompters to blame everyone else for their screw ups once said, “The buck stops here.”
2. It’s CMS, the government, that was responsible for coordinating the implementation of the work of all the different contractors and testing the product.
Kathleen Sebelius did not need to take on that role. It would normally be assigned to the private sector. Instead CMS took responsibility for it.
That means the failure of the website is CMS’ fault.
It was CMS that was responsible for integration and testing. It was CMS that kept rewriting the specs and redesigning the website at the last minute.
It was CMS that ignored warnings from insurers that the website would be a disaster. It was CMS that failed to fully test account creation until a week before launch time.
None of that is private sector. The private sector companies did a poor job of making a rushed product at the last minute for an employer who didn’t know what she wanted. The private sector is quite clearly capable of building fully working health insurance websites. The problem here wasn’t the private sector, it was the government.





















