The rollout of the federal Obamacare website has been a disaster , full stop . There can be no excuses , nor will I be making any . It 's been clear for years what needed to be done , and failing was not an option . The exchanges , and the website that allowed access to them , had to work , and they just do not . I wrote a week or two ago that the initial problems with the HealthCare.gov website appeared to be because of volume issues . That could be spun as either a positive or negative thing . But it now seems that the surge was not the cause of the malfunctions . After the first weekend , when the administration added additional capacity to the servers , the issues did n't go away . What are they ? I wish I could say for sure . But some good reports have come out that detail just a few of the problems . Have you had trouble signing up ? Tell us your experience . The first appears to be that the administration decided that people would need to provide a significant amount of personal detail to look at coverage options . I can attest to this first-hand . I have insurance through my work , so I do n't need exchange coverage , but I was still interested in looking at what was available . I had to provide a lot of information , about my job and family , before I could do so . It 's possible that this was because administrators wanted to be able to provide subsidy information to people with the premium costs , so as to soften the blow of how expensive insurance could be , but no one knows for sure . Regardless , this complicated things significantly . But that 's just the front end . The back end is also a real problem . Insurance companies are reporting that the data they are receiving from the HealthCare.gov website is garbled . This means that automatic processing of the insurance plans being ordered is impossible . Oddly enough , the problems on the front end are actually helping here . So few orders are actually making it through that insurance companies are able to sort through the bad data by hand to complete enrollment . But if things improve on the front end , then there 's no way these companies can do millions of applications without good data . The administration is bragging that upwards of half a million applications have started . Shockingly few of them have been completed , though . The front end has a number of steps , including submitting your information , assessing for eligibility and then shopping for insurance . The number being cited by the administration refers only to people who have completed the first step . There are people who believe that government can never do things as well as the private sector . I 'm not one of those people . But in this specific instance , those people have a point . Evidently , those in charge of the rollout of the exchange website were unprepared . They did n't have the necessary experience to manage the more than 50 different contractors producing software independently that would eventually need to function together as a whole . This is incredibly technical work , and it 's not clear that government was in a good position to direct things here . It appears that the Obama administration has learned its lesson . Administration officials are now calling in `` more computer experts '' to try and fix the problem . But this may be too little , too late . Some are saying that even if the administration pours in massive resources , the problems may not be fixed by December 15 , the deadline for when insurance needs to be bought for it to be covering people on January 1 . Even if the administration can get this done within a month , some in the insurance industry are concerned that these issues may act as a filter to dissuade healthy people from getting insurance . If it 's really , really hard to complete an application , then only truly ill people may have the perseverance to do so . That could lead to problems in the pool of people signing up for insurance . The administration needs healthy people to buy insurance , too , for the exchanges to function optimally . If we were talking about a company having mismanaged things so badly , you could be sure that heads would roll . Many would be fired , and there would be a change in management . But that may not be possible here . Were Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to go , President Barack Obama could n't get someone else vetted and through the Senate nomination process in an expedient manner . He 's likely stuck with his current team , or no team at all . That does n't mean Obamacare will fail . It 's still possible that this could all be fixed . It 's also possible that should significant issues continue , timelines might be adjusted to accommodate implementation issues . But these will cause problems political and real in nature . Continued failures in the exchange rollout give the President 's opponents fuel to attack him and his health care reform . More importantly , they prevent people who really do need insurance , and the care it allows , from getting what they need .
Aaron Carroll : Obamacare rollout has been a disaster ; there 's no excuse for it . He says problems at front end of process make it hard to get even through first step . Comment: Carroll : Obamacare needed , but these first days have created problems political and real .