Has the White House learned a lesson yet from the fallout from ObamaCare? Former press secretary and Barack Obama campaign guru Robert Gibbs certainly hopes so.  Gibbs tells Morning Joe today that the use of foggy metrics like “works for a vast majority of users” has left the Obama administration open to scathing criticisms of its honesty and competence while many users see the site fail to process their requests.  At least, Gibbs hopes that the White House will deal more honestly with their failures to get the back end of the infrastructure — that which actually enrolls and subsidizes those insurance plans — finally up and working (via The Weekly Standard):

“Well, look, I think, you know, the notion that it works for a vast majority of users, obviously, is as many have pointed out an arbitrary measure. We don’t know the exact number. It is clear from reporting that people are having a better user experience,” said Gibbs.

“Again, I think the pressure now will be on the administration to be more forthcoming about what’s happening on the back-end and whether insurance companies are getting the information.”

On the other hand, perhaps they’re being just a bit too honest. Chuck Todd noted yesterday on Meet the Press that the administration bragged in its release that the HHS development project was now “operating with private-sector velocity and effectiveness.” If it took 44 months for them to achieve that level of operation, Todd says, isn’t that a pretty good reason not to pursue government-run solutions to private-sector reform? No kidding (via Newsbusters and Mediaite):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21Pu_Kryug8

CHUCK TODD: David, the most interesting thing in this report, right, page one– it’s page three of the report, it says here that, “The team is operating with private sector velocity and effectiveness.”

DAVID GREGORY: Yeah.

CHUCK TODD: Okay, that is an acknowledgement that, “You know what? If this was a government operation for a long time and it failed, now we’re bringing in the private sector folks.” I mean, that is an indictment on the whole idea of government as a solution, frankly, when you look at [unintelligible].

And that’s assuming that the Healthcare.gov team actually has achieved that level of competence.  In the private sector, companies don’t brag about that — it’s the minimum expected in a competitive market.  The fact that they have to brag about that tends to make one skeptical that they even comprehend what “private-sector velocity and effectiveness” means.