Everybody’s apologizing for the debacle that is the new healthcare.gov site! (Don’t click on that, you’ll get stuck for a week.) Health and Human Services honcho Kathleen Sebelius! (“You deserve better. I apologize. I’m accountable to you for fixing these problems. And I’m committed to earning your confidence back by fixing the site.”)

Missed it by that much.

Medicare & Medicaid macher Marilyn Tavenner! (“To the millions who have tried to use HealthCare.gov, we want to apologize to you. This initial experience has not lived up to our expectations, or the expectations of the American people, and it is not acceptable.”)

It was an itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny bit of total non-functionality.

Joe Biden! (“Neither [Obama] or I are technology geeks, and we assumed it was up and ready to run. The good news is, although it’s not, and we apologize for that, we’re confident that by the end of November it will be and there will still be plenty of time for people to register online.”)

James Joyce said, “Mistakes are the portals of discovery.” See this tiny portal!

The president has not apologized — though he’s acknowledged that the launch has been problematic — because heaven forbid he look weak. As long as you’ve got lingering ill-will toward Republicans from the government shutdown on your side, you don’t want to squander it by opening yourself up to accusations that you’re an apologetic, incompetent, ineffectual weenus.

Presumably there will be more apologies as we hear more horror stories about the site, about people’s existing health plans being cancelled and about the incompetence of some of the health care “navigators.” Stay tuned.

But let’s go big-picture for a minute. Unfortunately, there’s a key element still missing from the apologies we’ve heard so far: REPARATION. For someone who claims to be accountable, Sibelius was unnervingly quick to name the government contractors and officials at other agencies who made “crucial decisions” that hobbled the web site. That doesn’t inspire confidence. And until we have a functional site, her apologies mean very little. Where’s the Change We Can Believe In?

As you know, the great sage Moses Maimonides said, “Whoever merely verbalizes his confession without consciously deciding to give up his sins is like a person who immerses in a ritual pool (mikveh) in order to cleanse himself, but is holding a dead reptile in his hand.” Sibelius is still holding the reptile. And psychiatrist Aaron Lazare, author of On Apology, wrote that the final necessary element of a good apology is making it up to people. We’re waiting.

It feels to me that in our culture there’s been a raft of apologizing without reparation. Folks with offensive Halloween costumes shouldn’t just say they’re sorry; they should tell us how they’re educating themselves about why blackface is bad, and they should volunteer for or make a donation to a cultural organization that fights bigotry. Juicing athletes should donate their winnings to sports scholarship organizations or groups that fight a winning-is-everything mentality. The words are not enough. Apology is both speech and action.

My bro-in-law Neal pointed me toward an interesting conversation on NPR’s Marketplace between superlatively named host Kai Ryssdal and Harvard Business School professor Nancy Koehn. Koehn, who studies the history of business, pointed out that the public is also at fault for not demanding more. (I think we have short attention spans.) (Look, a pretty flower.) “I’m not sure from whence [sic] this slow settling of not demanding accountability came from,” Koehn said. “There have been in the last 20 years examples of leaders who’ve stepped up to the plate…think of James Burke in the Tylenol crisis; think of Dave Neeleman, the CEO of JetBlue saying, ‘We didn’t create the blizzard but my goodness we’re responsible for the experience passengers had on those planes siting there on the runway.'”

Koehn stressed that “words are meaningless unless there’s a consequence.” She concluded, “We don’t — as citizens, consumers, voters, members of communities — demand something better of our very prominent officials and leaders.”

But I don’t know how demanding accountability would actually work, other than voting politicians out of office and pressuring corporate boards to fire CEOs. How do we stop cheating in sports when we demand superhuman performance from our athletes? How do we make idiot celebs turn their idiocy into meaningful social action? You tell me. I understand the words part of the puzzle — it’s the lasting-change part that’s harder for me to wrap my brain around.