The President may not be reading SmallBusiness.com, but he sure seems to be channeling last week’s “5 ways to respond to a mistake.” In a Rose Garden address this morning, he tried to explain why the HealthCare.gov insurance marketplace (it’s not just a website) for individuals and small businesses has been so filled with bugs. And he tried his best not to blame the IT department.

“There’s no sugar coating it: The Web site is too slow; people have been getting stuck in the application process,” Obama said, according to the Washington Post. “And I think it is fair to say that no one is more frustrated by the problem than I am.”

Practicing his best buck-stops-here Harry Truman, Obama apologized and admitted, “There’s no excuse for the problems … and they are being fixed.” He said the government is “doing everything we can possibly do” to repair the site, including 24-hour work from “some of the best IT talent in the country.”

Our advice? Amazon.com should have been awarded the contract, but, hey, no one asked us.

A good explanation of what went wrong (doing it the government way) and what could have worked (open-source facets of the projects) appeared last week on BusinessWeek.com.

On the SmallBusiness.com WIKI: Affordable Care Act