The rollout of the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchange on Oct. 1 should have been the crowning achievement, to this point, of the presidency of Barack Obama.

Millions of people without health insurance should have gone to www.HealthCare.gov, registered, and started to shop for health care coverage that would insure them and their families for everything from routine doctor visits to catastrophic illness. Those who couldn’t afford it should have been able to determine if they were eligible for financial assistance and, if so, what their net costs would have been after the subsidies were deducted.

Millions have, in fact, visited the website, only to be stymied by a frustrating system fraught with all manner of obstacles and error messages.

They came, it seems, but the government didn’t build it.

According to an article in the Sunday New York Times that detailed the series of miscalculations and missteps behind the rollout’s failure, many visitors to the site have been unable to even log in, much less do the one-stop, comparison health-insurance shopping that passage of the ACA had promised.

“These are not glitches,” according to an unnamed insurance executive quoted in the Times. “The extent of the problem is pretty enormous.”

Despite repeated assurances from high-level administration officials that everything was going to be fine – even in the face of many warnings to the contrary – the system doesn’t work. It is failure on a scale so massive that there is no historical parallel that comes readily to mind.

Many of the ACA’s Republican critics are licking their collective chops at the prospect of using it as a campaign issue in next November’s midterm elections, and that might be considered a reasonable strategy in most years. But it’s hard to see how the GOP – at least as it’s currently constituted – will have the credibility needed to unwrap even a gift such as the botched rollout. They’ll have to answer for the government shutdown and for taking us to the brink of default. They have, it seems, other things to worry about, getting out of their own way being first among them.

Some of the more seasoned members in the Republican party warned the tea party types not to go down the shutdown-default paths. Let the ACA blow up of its own accord, they said, and reap the benefits in the next election. But Sen. Ted Cruz and his House followers believed their own rhetoric in the mistaken assumption that everybody else was dumber than they were. Because of that hubris and arrogance, what once looked like a midterm election in which Republicans stood to pick up seats in the House and Senate now looks like it could be a slam dunk for Democrats, who might as well run on the slogan “We’re not Republicans.”

However it may play out as a campaign issue, there is no satisfaction to be taken in the rollout’s failure. It is flat-out bad for the country on a variety of fronts.

Just how bad isn’t yet clear, since the Obama administration won’t say how many people have enrolled in the first two weeks, or how many have attempted to sign up, only to be turned back by the technological failures.

We understand that the administration is embarrassed, but they should be honest with the country and put the numbers out there. The public is, after all, footing the $400 million bill and we are entitled to answers. We are also entitled to a system that works – especially for that kind of money.

And now, the silver lining in the failure: The very fact that millions of people have attempted to access the health insurance website is strong evidence that those who championed the ACA were on to something. The heavy demand would seem to justify passage of the law, even if it still needs to be fixed.

That had better happen soon, though, lest the public lose confidence in the program before it even gets off the ground. If that happens, Republicans could find themselves right back in the election ballgame.

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