One of the most dispiriting spectacles of the last month has been the botched launch of HealthCare.gov, the website created to implement President Barack Obama's landmark healthcare reforms. Obamacare had a desperately turbulent passage through Congress and survived various wrecking attempts by the Tea Party and their accomplices. Then the glorious day dawned and millions of U.S. citizens hit the URL, hoping that, finally, they would be able to find a health-insurance plan that they could afford.
Guess what happened? According to the New York Times, of the 20 million people who tried to access the site over its first three weeks, only 500,000 managed to complete applications for health cover and an even smaller percentage of them actually succeeded in obtaining insurance. In an unprecedented move, the president had to make a public apology for the shambles.
At this point, British readers will mutter: "Well, at least he had the grace to apologize." Ministers in successive British governments of all stripes have, over the years, presided over some IT cockups that put the Obamacare one in the shade. My guess is that upward of £10 billion has been blown over the years in massive government IT projects that turned out to be death marches to cancelation. But usually the bad news was quietly buried and we heard about it only when the National Audit Office lifted the stone to see what lay beneath.