Obamacare's Big Thinkers Forgot to Bring in the Doers
...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.

On the other hand, if they admit that it might not work on Nov. 30, the national discussion will immediately start focusing on delaying all or part of the law. This way, they buy themselves a month’s respite from demands for a delay, and they also make that delay much harder to implement, because more people will have bought through the state exchanges or had their existing insurance policies canceled by their insurers. Sure, that might seriously screw up the insurance markets -- but as far as I can tell, the administration has decided, possibly correctly, that any backward movement, however small, puts the whole law in grave danger. So damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead....

...But I’ve never seen a gap this complete -- one in which the entire IT organization seems to have been panicking about the impossibility of their task, and then the inevitable failures, while the folks issuing the orders were blithely issuing last-minute change orders and telling everyone they could find how swell this was all going to be. Usually, when things are going this wrong, you do more than casually mention it; you sit the folks on the business side down and explain that unless the project is pushed back, it’s going to be an unmitigated disaster. ...