You know it's bad when the White House would rather talk about healthcare.gov.

For months the Obama administration has done its best to steer the national conversation away from the glitchy website, repeating on cue that, for most people, the healthcare law is working great, notwithstanding troubles with the site, which anyway is alllll-most fixed.

But on Tuesday the White House steered the conversation toward the website. Why? The alternative topic was apparently even more unsavory: NSA spying.

Consider a pair of statements released Tuesday after a meeting between President Barack Obama and executives from top technology companies. The meeting came one week after the companies jointly published an open letter declaring “it is time for the world’s governments to address the practices and laws regulating government surveillance of individuals and access to their information”.

“We strongly believe that current laws and practices need to be reformed,” wrote the companies, which included Yahoo, Google, Apple and Microsoft.

The tech giants, who have bottom lines to look after, are understandably passionate about the issue. So did they bring it up in their nearly three-hour meeting on Pennsylvania Avenue? To hear the White House describe it, barely.

"The group discussed a number of issues of shared importance to the federal government and the tech sector, including the progress being made to improve performance and capacity issues with heathcare.gov,” began the official description of the meeting. “The president also announced that Kurt DelBene, who most recently served as president of the Microsoft Office division, will succeed Jeff Zients …”

It goes on from there. Then, at the very end, just after the part about maximizing innovation in federal IT procurement, the statement serves up some anodyne language about surveillance and privacy issues:

Finally, the group discussed the national security and economic impacts of unauthorized intelligence disclosures. This was an opportunity for the President to hear from CEOs directly as we near completion of our review of signals intelligence programs, building on the feedback we’ve received from the private sector in recent weeks and months. The President made clear his belief in an open, free, and innovative internet and listened to the group’s concerns and recommendations, and made clear that we will consider their input as well as the input of other outside stakeholders as we finalize our review of signals intelligence programs.

Contrast that with the terse summary of the meeting jointly issued by the companies:

We appreciated the opportunity to share directly with the President our principles on government surveillance that we released last week and we urge him to move aggressively on reform.

The executives don’t even mention healthcare.gov.

Conversations with two people briefed on the meetings do not buoy the White House version of events. Out of a series of meetings that lasted two hours and 45 minutes, approximately 45 of those minutes were devoted to healthcare.gov and non-NSA issues, according to two executives at tech companies represented at the meetings. Not only was the website distinctly not the focus of Tuesday's meetings, they said, the president and vice-president were not even present for the bit when the site was discussed. That discussion was relegated to adviser Valerie Jarrett and chief of staff Denis McDonough.

The meeting was not really about healthcare.gov. But to hear the White House tell it, it was one big brainstorm about software patches and EIDM tools.

The president has good reason, at the moment, to avoid the NSA conversation. On Monday, a scathing ruling was published in which a federal judge argued that NSA spying likely violates the constitution. A day earlier a ringer task force appointed by Obama to look into NSA reform submitted a report with recommendations which the White House pre-emptively deemed too hot to implement.

It appears that some sort of moment of truth may be coming in which the White House may have to pick sides in the surveillance v privacy debate. If Obama picks one side he will tick off the intelligence community; if he picks the other he may tick off a much larger constituency. As the strain of actual decision-making intensifies, the groans of discomfort from an administration dearly in love with the safe middle are audible, even with no fancy equipment.

Press secretary Jay Carney has been evasive this week when asked about the NSA, and about the court ruling by judge Richard Leon, which challenges the constitutionality of bulk phone records collection. At a Monday briefing, Carney referred reporters to the Justice Department. On Tuesday, he described the meeting with tech CEOs as focusing on healthcare, but "also addressing national security and economic impacts of the unauthorized intelligence disclosures" by Edward Snowden.

Asked point-blank whether the meeting had in fact been prompted by the letter from the tech industries, Carney replied: "I don't have the answer to that … whether this specific meeting was in response to that letter I cannot say, but this is the first time that the president has sat down with tech CEOs."

Carney added that the meeting “may have been something that was going to be scheduled anyway”.

By the way – did you hear about healthcare.gov? They say the wait times are shorter than ever.

Paul Lewis contributed reporting from Washington