Will Digital Disaster Upend the Affordable Care Act?

The White House has promised that Healthcare.gov will be running smoothly by the end of November, but yesterday, it crashed again. At today's briefing, Press Secretary Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters, "We have several teams, many teams of highly qualified experts who are addressing the identified and isolated problems that do exist and have existed with the website, and they are fixing them incrementally as Jeff Zients and others have talked about." Why has so much gone so badly so soon for the signature accomplishment of President Obama's first term? Some website programmers say it started too late and too big. They warn that the planned "tech surge" could make things worse, rather than better. With Democrats demanding delays in signups and penalties and Republicans calling for heads to roll, the urgency of finding a fix grows by the day.