The latest Bloomberg Businessweek details efforts to make the Obamacare online experience as smooth and simple as possible. Why is this important?

The ACA has survived dozens of Republican attempts to unravel it, a presidential election in part about repealing it, and a Supreme Court challenge to nullify it. But the surest way to failure is if Americans have a crummy experience when they try to sign up for it.

The people behind state and federal efforts to build the health websites know this. “Ease of use was a core value from the beginning,” says Curt Kwak, the chief information officer for Washington State’s health-care exchange. “Everything from the color schemes to the way the site flows was meant to make things very simple.”

Making the process of choosing a health insurance plan simple, let alone pleasant, is not easy. And President Obama hasn’t exactly lowered expectations. In a press conference on Oct. 1, he said people will be able to shop for a health plan on the exchanges “the same way you’d order a plane ticket on Kayak or a TV on Amazon.”

As the federal government moves to exercise more control over one-sixth of the American economy, though, the following passage offers an interesting observation.

[Big Spaceship user-experience expert Chris] Fahey says the state sites and even the federal one have a way to go before they meet Obama’s goal of an Amazon-like experience. A successful exchange “should be like TurboTax, not the IRS,” he says. Washington State’s [Michael] Marchand couldn’t agree more. “The best compliment I’ve heard,” he says, “is that our site doesn’t look like something from the government.”

So people view a for-profit company’s products more favorably than those spawned by a government bureaucracy? It would have been nice to keep that in mind before Washington officials came up with Obamacare.