Skikha Dalmia:
By all accounts, the roll out of Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges has been a fiasco of epic proportions. But diehard supporters claim that this is a minor roadblock that won’t affect the law’s long-term future.
“Obamacare is here,” lectured liberal Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson. “Get used to it.” Robinson might be right.
Then again, when funnyman Jon Stewart echoes Tea Party “wackos” to demand a one-year delay of the individual mandate, the lynchpin of the edifice, you know all is not well.
The reality is that the way President Obama ramrodded this law through Congress has left him very little margin for error. The next couple of months will make or break the program.
Ten days into the launch, legions of consumers still can’t log into the federal exchange website, let alone compare plans, apply for the promised subsidies and buy coverage.
The site — whose staggering $634 million construction cost exceeds that of LinkedIn and Spotify combined — has already been shut down once for repairs, but the problems persist.
Thing are so bad that the administration won’t even reveal basic information about enrollment rates that many suspect are in the single digits.
Nor will it make its IT folks available to explain the technical glitches, insisting that “pent-up demand” is overwhelming capacity.
But experts whom Reuters consulted believe that the architecture of the websites is fundamentally flawed and needs to be radically overhauled.
For example, when individuals “apply” for coverage, the website automatically opens more 90 separate files and plugins to stream information from the user’s computer. The flood of traffic paralyzes the connection.
None of this is unexpected. In fact, insurance companies now say they’d been warning the administration for months that the exchange was not ready for prime time.
But the same reason the administration rushed to launch is also why it can’t afford any extended delays now.
The law requires every American to have coverage by sometime early next year, although theadministration keeps changing its mind about the precise date.
This is the citation, the Boston Globe:
As of today, not even Kathleen Sebelius can get you signed up!
She brought over a dozen IT experts to a sign-up in Pittsburg but not one of them could walk a would-be ObamaCare applicant through the system successfully.
At the end of the day (literally, not as a figure of speech) she blamed Pittsburg for not having good enough connectivity for computers!
I have read that more than two states still have not had one person able to apply successfully.
Here is more obamaFAIL –
http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/10/report-a-mere-51000-people-signed-up-on-obamacare-site-in-first-week/
So…using that number of 51,000 in the first week who managed to sign up…if there are truly 45 million uninsured that are now required to get health insurance (or pay the tax/fine/penalty) then at that rate of government efficiency, it will only take a little over 73 YEARS to get all those uninsured signed up. Of course that doesn’t count the folks who were happy with the perfectly good insurance they already had who are now being cancelled because obamacare makes their old policies illegal for not covering maternity and breast cancer screenings for men and post-menopausal women, chiropractic and addiction services, and all the other “one-size-fits-all” stupidity of the obamacare design.
http://www.jammiewf.com/2013/another-obamacare-success-story-thousands-of-connecticut-doctors-fired-by-united-healthcare/
But didn’t Obama insist repeatedly that if you liked your doctor you would be able to keep your doctor?
And even CBS and NBC are finally doing stories pointing out just how horrible obamacare functionality is – especially for something that has been 3 YEARS in the making.
http://freebeacon.com/cbs-calls-obamacare-website-launch-nothing-short-of-disastrous/
http://freebeacon.com/nbc-blasts-obamacare-exchanges-the-focus-of-ridicule-and-a-complete-mess/
And the people that are responsible for this embarrassingly incompetent rollout of Obama’s SIGNATURE LEGISLATION think that we should be chomping at the bit to give them responsibility for our medical care? Really?
The do-gooder leftists LOVE to give us all anecdotal stories to push unpopular and unwise legislation based solely on the leftist idea that their good intentions are so snuggly that eventually things will work out dandy – just because we will all hug each other and sing Kumbayah while skipping over the rainbow bridge. Well, here is one of many anecdotes that show what an unmitigated kick in the unprotected groin obamacare is:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/mother-forced-obamacare-choose-between-new-health-plan-or-putting-food-table_762408.html
Obamacare is inherently unworkable, and frankly designed to cause maximum financial hardship. Remember this when the same do-gooder assholes start demanding single payer as the solution to the obamacare horror that they crammed down our throats. I would recommend finding ways to introduce said do-gooder assholes intimately with the trauma system. There is nothing good about obamacare. It must be destroyed.
This is a classic example of why those who make laws should be the ones who live under those laws first. You don’t beta test a law affecting 20% of GDP on the general population this way.
No private sector company would survive with this kind of product roll out.
And of course our main stream media asks no questions of our dear leader about it.