How many years did they have to get it ready?

WASHINGTON — When Rahm Emanuel was White House chief of staff and Ezekiel Emanuel was helping draft the Affordable Care Act, the famously combative brothers clashed over the health care law.

“He thought we should have done something more incremental, that doing something comprehensive is not in the nature of the American health care system, and I thought doing something more comprehensive was absolutely essential to actually fixing the health care system,” Zeke Emanuel said in an interview on USA TODAY’s Capital Download. President Obama backed a comprehensive overhaul, but when the roll-out of the healthcare.gov exchanges went badly this fall, Rahm Emanuel wasn’t shy about saying I-told-you-so.

“Ever call me? How about every day,” Zeke Emanuel told the weekly video newsmaker series. He imitated the razzing query posed by his brother, now the mayor of Chicago: “How we doing, Zeke?”

But now, the prominent health policy analyst says the technical problems that have dogged the website are being solved and “will soon be forgotten.” In the end, he predicts, the law will succeed in transforming the American health care system, though he says a judgment on whether it fully has worked probably can’t be made for another two years, until the end of 2015. […]

What went wrong?

“Partially it is 14 months of very hard work on this piece of legislation and then a sense of exhaustion,” he suggests. “We got it passed, and then moved on and by the time people sort of began to pay attention, a structure had been put in place, then inertia takes over.”

Now common-sense measures, including an intensive effort to fix the glitches and the decision to put a single person in charge, are turning things around, he says.

Emanuel declines to say whether officials should resign or be fired as a result of the problems, and he offers a qualifier when asked if that sort of accountability would be taking place in the private sector after such a stumble. “It is always worth noting that in many private-sector companies, they don’t roll heads immediately,” he says. “They get the problem solved and then they tend to roll heads.”