How Republicans are saving ObamaCare

"So far, the Affordable Care Act's launch has been a failure," says Ezra Klein at The Washington Post. "Not 'troubled.' Not 'glitchy.' A failure." Ed Morrissey at The Week makes a similar point, but unlike Morrissey, Klein is a supporter of the law, better known as ObamaCare. And Klein isn't the only ObamaCare supporter who is publicly criticizing its rollout.

"This is excruciatingly embarrassing for the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services," former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told MSNBC's Alex Wagner. "This was bungled badly." The website has "glitches that go, quite frankly, way beyond the pale of what should be expected," Gibbs added, and "when they get it fixed, I hope they fire some people that were in charge of making sure that this thing was supposed to work." Watch:

There are several journalistic postmortems on what went wrong. The New York Times' Robert Pear, Sharon LaFraniere, and Ian Austen have a well-reported look at the various obstacles, questionable decisions, and politics behind the botched rollout, citing one person familiar with the HealthCare.gov project as saying it's only roughly 70 percent of the way toward operating properly.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Alex Howard at BuzzFeed digs into the antiquated rules governing federal contracts. "Given how well the Obama campaign used technology to support getting the Democratic nominee for president elected, I've seen many people wondering how his administration has so badly botched the technology behind his signature legislative achievement," Howard says. The short answer is that campaigns are free to hire whom they want and take risks; right now, governments generally aren't.

It's worth highlighting that not all ObamaCare exchange sites are as messed up as the federal version, which has to serve more than 30 states, all of whom declined to create their own exchanges. Kentucky, where Gov. Steve Beshear (D) has embraced ObamaCare, has an exchange site that seems to be working just fine. So the Obama team has "no excuse for not being more prepared," says Taylor Marsh at her blog. "The White House is running ObamaCare like a drown the government in the bathtub Republican."

It is ironic, then, that the "one thing has gone abundantly right for the Affordable Care Act" is the Republican Party, says The Washington Post's Klein.

That's not the only way the GOP is rescuing ObamaCare, either. "I think a large share of people don't realize that this problems with the Affordable Care Act IT infrastructure have very little to do with Republicans and basically nothing to do with the shutdown," says Matthew Yglesias at Slate.

Byron York at The Washington Examiner is exasperated at the GOP for "pounding themselves" instead of "pounding Obama on the mandates, defects, false promises, and expense of ObamaCare" — but he sees a silver lining: There will be plenty of time to continue the fight. "Long after a continuing resolution has been passed and the debt limit raised, ObamaCare will still be a major, and for many unwelcome, factor in American life."