If you were wondering whether the increasing pile of evidence indicating that HealthCare.Gov’s problems are not merely opening “glitches” but deep-seated design defects — as well as the growing chorus of IT experts suggesting that the Obama administration might want to consider starting over on the badly bungled project — would have any effect whatsoever on their determination to plow forward with their arbitrary and political deadlines… don’t hold your breath. HHS Secretary Sebelius would like you to know that completely rebuilding the website is just not gonna’ happen, via the WSJ:

After two weeks of review, the HHS secretary concluded, “We didn’t have enough testing, specifically for high volumes, for a very complicated project.”

The online insurance marketplace needed five years of construction and a year of testing, she said: “We had two years and almost no testing.” …

Overall, she said, the website is functional and “we will hit the mark” within the law’s six-month open enrollment period that began Oct. 1. “I’m not throwing out the system and starting over,'” she said. …

Mrs. Sebelius convenes meetings, often three times a day, to monitor progress against the technological snafus. “I can’t fix the website myself,” she said. “But I’m working around the clock to find out what we know in extraordinary and honest detail, hold our contractors and our team accountable, and accelerate the timeline to resolve the problems.”

Gee, “not enough testing” — ya’ think? Isn’t “accelerating the timeline” what got us into this mess?

And as for working “working around the clock,” I find it rather interesting that Secretary Sebelius finds “scheduling conflicts” to be a passable excuse for refusing to appear in front of Congress next week to answer what many on the Right and the Left now agree are reasonable questions about why the administration insisted upon moving forward with a product that at least somebody over there knew wasn’t ready, and yet she seems to have the time to attend galas in the meantime. Most curious, really, as CNN pointed out on Friday:

The WSJ editors are not impressed:

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is even refusing to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in a hearing this coming Thursday. HHS claims she has scheduling conflicts, but we hope she isn’t in the White House catacomb under interrogation by Valerie Jarrett about her department’s incompetence.

The department is also refusing to make available lower-level officials who might detail the source or sources of this debacle. Ducking an investigation with spin is one thing. Responding with a wall of silence to the invitation of a duly elected congressional body probing the use of more than half a billion taxpayer dollars is another. This Obama crowd is something else.