Now what should be done? On Monday, President Obama both criticized and defended the Web site. While he conveyed an all-hands-on-deck attitude and his commitment to solving the problems, he did not give sufficient specifics.

But there are five things we can do now to right the ship of Obamacare.

The president should create a new position: an independent chief executive of the federal exchange. On Tuesday, the White House announced that the economic adviser Jeffrey D. Zients will oversee the “tech surge” in the short term. Mr. Zients is a great manager and was a health care industry consultant, but he is also about to take on an important job as director of the National Economic Council. We need someone who can not just begin the repair process, but also run and refine the exchange’s operations for at least the next two years.

This C.E.O. should meet one on one with the president every week to ensure he or she has full authority to carry out the job. The candidate should have management experience, knowledge of how both the government and health insurance industry work, and at least some familiarity with IT systems. Obviously this is a tall order, but there are such people. And the administration needs to hire one immediately, while Mr. Zients works to put out the fires.

Second, the system needs to borrow from other exchanges. While the federal exchange has been a fiasco, many state exchanges have been working well since they launched earlier this month. One of the assignments for the students in my health policy class at the University of Pennsylvania this semester was to window-shop for insurance policies on the California exchange. They found the site easy to use and said there were many choices and the prices were competitive, even before subsidies. These students are the key demographic — young and healthy — that the sites need if they are going to succeed. Mr. Zients and the new C.E.O. should be looking carefully at the California, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Maryland, New York and any other successful state-run exchanges, and seeing which aspects can be adopted into the federal exchange, without reinventing it wholesale.

Next, the administration needs to be candid with the public. Given the disappointing rollout of the Web site, Americans are justifiably suspicious. Starting now, the administration needs to initiate a concerted effort to win back the public’s trust. There should be twice-weekly briefings that feature honest and complete descriptions of both the problems and solutions that the tech team is working on — in all the gory detail. We need to hear from those “best and brightest” experts whom President Obama has enlisted in the tech surge. Transparency is the only way to convince the American people that the situation is under control.