President Barack Obama will declare the
glitches in a new healthcare website “unacceptable” on Monday and
outline ways for consumers to sign up for insurance while his team
scrambles to fix problems that have tainted the rollout of his signature
healthcare law.
Fresh from two weeks of budget battles that
have consumed Washington, Obama will hold an event at 11:25 a.m. in the
White House Rose Garden with consumers, small business owners, and
pharmacists who have been affected by the new law.
Now, like every new law, every new product
rollout, there are going to be some glitches in the signup process along
the way that we will fix… For example, we found out that there have
been times this morning where the site has been running more slowly than
it normally will… We’re going to be speeding things up in the next few
hours to handle all this demand that exceeds anything that we had
expected.
Consider that just a couple of weeks ago,
Apple rolled out a new mobile operating system. And within days, they
found a glitch, so they fixed it. I don’t remember anybody suggesting
Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads — or threatening to shut down
the company if they didn’t.
So what are we to make of this comment from Kathleen Sebelius, offered to the Wall Street Journal in an article appearing this weekend?
After two weeks of review, the HHS
secretary concluded, “We didn’t have enough testing, specifically for
high volumes, for a very complicated project.”
The online insurance marketplace needed
five years of construction and a year of testing, she said: “We had two
years and almost no testing.”
There’s no “innocent mistake” option here. This was either epic incompetence (meaning both the Democratic Congress that passed this bill and the administration that promised to implement it simply couldn’t understand how much time it would take to set up the system) or epic dishonesty (making promises they knew they couldn’t keep, but felt were necessary to ensure the political health of the administration).
On Sunday, the Department of Health and Human Services bragged, there have been “over 19 million unique visits to date to HealthCare.gov.” (Mind you, that’s just visiting the web site, not actually filling out any forms.) Way to go, Secretary Sebelius, that’s almost as much as the 21 million hits Drudge gets in a day. In a two-week span, Drudge gets about, say, 450 million hits.
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