By Robert Laurie ——Bio and Archives--October 14, 2013
American Politics, News | CFP Comments | Reader Friendly | Subscribe | Email Us
"This is excruciatingly embarrassing for the White House and for the Department of Health and Human Services. This was bungled badly. This was not a server problem, like, just too many people came to the website. This is a website architecture problem. Again, it’s excruciatingly embarrassing. It’s not fatal because there are still many weeks and days to go before the enrollment period closes at the end of March.
I gave credit to Al Hunt in his column today. I thought he had an interesting statistic. The Massachusetts health care rollout, people came on average 18 times to the marketplace website - before they signed up for insurance. This is not iTunes. I hear a great album, I’m going to go buy it, boom, I buy it, and it’s a one-time easy transaction. This is health care. It’s very involved. People are going to take their time with it. But boy, if they don’t get these glitches figured out fast, people aren’t going to come back for visits 15 through 18. I will say this: I hope they’re working day and night to get this done, and when they get it fixed; I hope they fire some people who were in charge of making sure this thing was supposed to work. We knew there were going to be some glitches but these were glitches that go - quite frankly - way beyond the pale of what should be expected."These statements contain more truth than anything Gibbs managed to utter during his two years as Obama's official mouthpiece. First off, it's fun to hear a prominent Dem admit that an Obamacare signup will not be the simple, easy, one-stop-shopping experience it was sold as. Beyond that, he still has a couple of major problems. Since the inception of this law, the more people learn about it, the less they like it. Today, even the Chicago Tribune is admitting that premiums and deductibles are skyrocketing due to Obamacare. Nothing has happened that is going to alter Americans' overwhelmingly negative opinion of Obamacare and simply fixing a website certainly isn't going to change that. Moreover, Gibbs "hopes" they have people working on it and he "hopes" it will be fixed soon? Super. Does anyone really have any faith that this is going to be a short term problem? Obama's own Press Secretary acknowledges that the botch-job is preventing people from signing up, says people should be fired over it, and is apparently praying that the "glitches" are eliminated soon. With that as a backdrop, how can anyone on the left argue that implementing a one year delay in the penalties for not signing up is some kind of draconian right-wing scheme? How can they possibly penalize people for not buying something from a website that they admit isn't working? Liberal logic.
Support Canada Free Press
View Comments
Robert Laurie’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain.com
Be sure to “like” Robert Laurie over on Facebook and follow him on Twitter. You’ll be glad you did.