Blame Obama for Obamacare's issues. Don't blame "government health insurance."

It's true: the rollout of the Obamacare federal exchange has been a mess. And while the problems began with technical issues, they're threatening to become a whole lot more.

This week's Capitol Hill circus was all about who's to blame. Is it the feds' fault or the contractors'? To those of us who, whatever our political sympathies, don't have an immediate dog in the blame game, the answer seems obvious: regardless of where the specific problems originated, it was the Obama administration's job to get this thing done. And the administration failed.

So it's not much of a rhetorical leap to go from "the exchanges are a mess" to "the federal government is bad at things" (also here, lots of other places). But this obscures more than it reveals, because the things that make Obamacare such a heavy technical lift are the same things that make it very much not a government takeover of health insurance. Mike Konzcal explains this as the difference between neoliberal social insurance (means tested, market based, a lot of state discretion, with a premium on choice and competition) and traditionally liberal social insurance (universal, public, federally run, with a premium on outcomes). Obamacare in general—and the exchanges in particular—are largely the former. This, not general government incompetence, is what makes them so complicated.