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Latest Obamacare 'fix': Turn it over to porn guys

The technological failures of Healthcare.gov highlight the lack of technological expertise in the federal government. All the best programmers go to AppleGoogle or Facebook.

Or porn. 

"My name is Corey Price, Vice President of adult entertainment website Pornhub.com," began a recent open letter to the White House. "On behalf of our company, I'd like to extend an offer to the Obama administration to help fix the U.S. health insurance exchange website."

And you thought the Affordable Care Act rollout was already obscene. 

But wait a minute. As Price points out, his website gets a lot of traffic. Like, tons. Legions of people are impatient to log on: "Pornhub.com believes its staff of talented engineers can help prepare the Obama administration to accommodate millions of concurrent users to avoid future 'tech surges.'" 

Naturally, Pornhub's offer was rebuffed as the PR stunt it undoubtedly is.

"I think that would be pretty inappropriate and something we would not be interested in doing," Julie Bataille of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services told reporters, apparently with a straight face.

Kind of a shame. Think about it. The porn industry knows technology.

It figured out home video before anyone else, playing a pivotal role in the VHS v. Betamax debate. Adult filmmakers pioneered the first successful business model on the Internet, and porn has been at the forefront of every new wave of technology — streaming, mobile, interactive. It's like the NASA of digital distribution, always pushing the envelope.

In fact, porn does technology better than it does porn.

Before we completely dismiss this offer, let's look at it from Pornhub's perspective.

Which group of American workers needs to stay on top of its collective well-being — often, it bears mentioning, with no access to affordable health care — more than adult film stars? Who needs that automatic birth control coverage that comes standard with Obamacare? These are Americans, and they have skin in the game. So to speak.

If the government is not going to let the porn industry fix the Healthcare.gov website, at least put its performers in charge of taking the Obamacare phone calls. They have a lot of experience there, too, and their customer service is excellent. 

Or so I'm told.

—By CNBC's Jane Wells; Follow her on Twitter: @janewells.

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