The Obamacare Finger-Pointing Flowchart

Hours and hours and hours of testimony later — including bizarre non sequiturs to the lands of Oz and Chicken Little — the picture is a bit tangled.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee had a simple question to figure out this week: Who or what is to blame for the HealthCare.gov belly-flop launch? Hours and hours and hours of testimony later, including bizarre non sequiturs to the lands of Oz and Chicken Little, the blame picture is a bit tangled.

Although Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said she took full responsibility for the "debacle," what became apparent was that the HealthCare.gov website was a messy entanglement of government contractors working in relative darkness from one another on their distinct components of the site. Each contractor said they could stand by their work, but the failure was in the aggregate, and not allowing enough time for testing and ironing out potential security concerns. As human psychology informs us, the more onlookers, the easier it is to disperse blame.

Despite the snafu, Gallup finds that the glitches haven't (or haven't yet) swayed public opinion on the health care law. Nineteen percent still say they aren't too familiar with the law in the first place.

(Graphic by Chris Danello)