Who’s to blame for the ObamaCare debacle? “First off all, in fairness,” Howard Dean told the Morning Joe crew earlier today, ou have to blame Republicans for some of this because they delayed everything they possibly could.” First we have to blame the party that (a) didn’t cast a single vote in favor of the ACA and (b) had no control over its 42-month rollout?  At which stage in the process do we hold responsible the people who spent $400 million in three and a half years, and who assured everyone all along the way that things were going swimmingly?

Probably 39th. Let’s not raise expectations too high (via Andrew Johnson at The Corner):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mrWXQ83XNvc

Dean went on to blame the Republican governors who wisely decided not to tempt fate with their own exchange systems:

“The problem is they shouldn’t have done a single-size-fits-all for the 36 states,” he continued. “Partly, I have to say, they had to do that because the Republican governors refused to accept exchanges.”

Dean went on to downplay the problems facing the websites, saying the glitches are “not big.”

Dean suggests that the White House should have built regional systems rather than national systems in order to make the process less complicated.  How exactly would that have helped? HHS couldn’t even build one system that connects the consumers to the insurers and the IRS properly, but they could have built four or five simultaneously?  That sounds like the kind of thinking that went into the Obama administration’s reform policies and managerial efforts on ObamaCare all along.

Democratic Senator Bill Nelson isn’t quite buying the blame-Republicans-first strategy. He wonders why no one’s been fired over the fiasco, and laments the lack of accountability in the Obama administration (via the Daily Caller):

Nelson said that someone may need to be fired once the problem-plagued federal Healthcare.gov website is up and running.

“That’s the problem in government today. People are not held to account,” he said.

Not if Howard Dean has anything to say about it, they aren’t.