There it is, above the fold, on today’s Wall Street Journal: “Software and Design Defects Cripple Health-Care Website.” Since the October 1st launch of Healthcare.gov, which coincided with the first day of the current government shutdown, the website has been plagued with problems. It’s been bogged down by bad or lazy code, unfriendly design, and other issues. Hopefully, some of these glitches will be addressed by simple fixes before the enrollment rush of November.

However, the main problem isn’t just flawed code, bad design, or page speed. Insurers participating in the health insurance exchange are reporting that 1% or fewer of the applications sent from Healthcare.gov have enough information to enroll applicants in a health plan.

The industry jargon is “batch corruption.” Batch corruption is a sign of data quality problems. Applicant enrollment data submitted through Healthcare.gov isn’t sufficient or accurate enough to process the applications. For instance, insurers are saying that they can’t associate applicants with their user IDs. There is also bad address data for applicants because of a problem with state name abbreviations.

In other words, the culprit isn’t the technology or the design of Healthcare.gov. The problem is that the fundamental business rules, around the process of applying and enrolling for a health insurance plan, have not been addressed.

Despite all the fanfare and controversy around health care reform and Obamacare, turns out it’s the boring stuff like data quality and business process that are tripping up the Healthcare.gov launch.

Usability guru Jared Spool was right: Web sites and apps (like Healthcare.gov) should not let the business rules take away from the user experience. Get the business rules right, don’t let them affect the user experience, and then make them invisible to the user.