HOW MANY “FAILURES” WILL IT TAKE?
by Sharon Rondeau
(Oct. 20, 2013) — The Obama regime has pledged to “do better” with its dysfunctional health care website after spending $634 million of taxpayer money to launch it.
Donors to Obama’s campaigns landed positions as website designers to produce a portal which has been down most of this weekend and unable to accommodate “the large volume of people who visited the site in its first days.”
Healthcare.gov opened for “business” on October 1, the same day which a partial government shutdown began after the House of Representatives voted to fund all government departments and programs except Obamacare. The stalemate ended on Wednesday evening, with Obamacare going forward unchanged other than for one new caveat to determine applicants’ eligibility for federal subsidies.
Scheduled testing of the health care website was reportedly not completed until a week before its launch, and many deadlines in the rollout of the law, passed in March 2010, were missed. Obama declared the law altered several times without a vote from Congress, which constitutionally is charged with making and amending federal laws.
The regime will not yet say how many people have actually completed the enrollment process but reports that “swift progress” has been made to “improve Healthcare.gov.”
The Department of Health and Human Services was given $54 million to hire “navigators” to purportedly assist people in enrolling in a health care program, but questions about their citizenship status, political activities, and ability to treat personal information confidentially have arisen.
An individual with knowledge of the construction of the healthcare.gov website said that poor “technical advisers” contributed to the failed launch of the site.
Enrollment numbers are said to have remained “low” and “ugly.” However, CNN reported that state health care exchanges have fewer technical problems and are showing more success with enrollments.
As of October 15, there had been “a couple” of Obamacare enrollments in the state or North Dakota. On Monday, Obamacare in the state of Iowa is reportedly “getting close” to being operational even as its navigators are still undergoing training.
CNN published a lengthy attempt at explaining how Obamacare would benefit people without insurance, including how the Healthcare.gov website was expected to function.
Many believe that Obamacare is unconstitutional despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that it could be considered a tax. Some have said that Americans can do away with the law by refusing to enroll so that the quota needed to sustain it is not met.
Speaker of the House John Boehner and others have said that the law is “a train wreck” whose failed launch resulted in single-digit enrollees in entire states despite an ultimate 7,000,000 goal nationwide.
The Obamacare website is not the only perceived failure of the regime. Obama’s long-form birth certificate, which was found to be fraudulent by a law enforcement investigation last year, was pronounced a “poor forgery.” A graphics expert interviewed by The Post & Email shortly after the White House released the image on April 27, 2011 said that it was “incredibly obvious” that it was a forgery.
This post was updated on October 21 at 7:42 a.m.