Bad managers ruined Obamacare

From Glenn Harlan Reynolds at USA Today:

All appearances to the contrary, the managers involved in this debacle aren't dumb. But they come from a background -- law and politics -- where arguments often take the place of reality, and plausibility can be as good as, or better than, truth.

What engineers know that lawyers and politicians often don't is that in the world of things, as opposed to people, there's no escaping the sharp teeth of reality. But in law, and especially politics, inconvenient facts are merely inconvenient, something to be rationalized away.

When our country has accomplished great things in the past, there has usually been a great engineer running the program: Hyman Rickover with the nuclear submarine program, or Wernher von Braun with the Apollo space program, for example. Rickover and von Braun were famously stern taskmasters, but they did not substitute wishes for reality.

Which may be why they were able to launch submarines, and rockets that astounded the world. While today, we can't even launch a website.

I disagree with Professor's Reynold assessment. The people who ran this program AREN"T the smartest people. They aren't smart and talented, because they have spend their entire career in Government. There are some talented people in Government, the serve out a sense of duty, that what's best for the Country is more important that their own personal gain. That explains those who are in the Military, low pay, hard work, but with a huge sense of Duty. The ones who run/ran the website development and the chain of command up to the President are a bunch of Ivory towered Academia type, who never ran anything in their careers.

"But that's now how may paper said it should work?!?!?" would be their response, if you could pump them full of truth serum.