Obamacare's Big Thinkers Forgot to Bring in the Doers

Last Friday, Jeffrey Zients, the fellow who's been tasked with overseeing the fixes to HealthCare.gov, gave a telephone briefing to reporters. Regretfully, I was at a conference and unable to sit in on that call. But I've corresponded with people who were, and it's been thoroughly written up in the Washington Post and elsewhere. The gist: They have a list of what needs to be fixed, and Zients says that by Nov. 30, he expects the website to be working for the vast majority of users. Jonathan Chait remarks:

That list is amusing, but it's not exhaustive; there is also a fourth possibility, which is that they are buying themselves time. Think of it this way: If the website doesn't work by Nov. 30, all hell will break loose. How much more hellacious will it get if the president's tech guy promised that the website would work and it didn't? Not all that much more hellacious, really.