Sunday, December 01, 2013

THE AWESOME EFFICIENCY OF GOVERNMENT: White House Considered Scrapping $500MM Healthcare.gov Site

Yesterday @Democracy2014 tweeted this "screenshot of the 'fixed' healthcare.gov website two pages into it."


Now I'm no computer expert, but that doesn't appear to be what you would call, eh, a working website.

Donald Douglas, writing at American Power, highlights one of the most shocking revelations from today's ludicrous talk shows.

Folks are talking about Obama advisor David Plouffe's psycho statement that the ObamaCare website will be working well in 2017. Jeez, right after Obama leaves office. Talk about leaving a steaming pile behind for your successor. Twitchy has that, "‘In denial at this point’: David Plouffe says Obamacare will work ‘really well’ by 2017..."


Watch it [here]. But pay attention to the opening segment, where Stepanopoulos reports that, "at one point the White House considered scrapping the site and starting all over again." This is the big story of the day, and it's being underreported amid the David Plouffe clown show and the state-media Orwellianism on the other Sunday shows (Emanuel Ezekiel and Ezra Klein provided the WTF analysis team on "Meet the Press"). That the White House seriously considered shutting down Healthcare.gov is the monumental concession of Democrat incompetence and Republican clairvoyance. It's the equivalent of folding your cards, of packing up and going home. A complete and utter defeat for the administration's marquee policy initiative, foreign or domestic. ObamaCare is the president's brand, and it's a loss leader.

The New York Times has it buried deep down in this report:

WASHINGTON — As a small coterie of grim-faced advisers shuffled into the Oval Office on the evening of Oct. 15, President Obama’s chief domestic accomplishment was falling apart 24 miles away, at a bustling high-tech data center in suburban Virginia.

HealthCare.gov, the $630 million online insurance marketplace, was a disaster after it went live on Oct. 1, with a roster of engineering repairs that would eventually swell to more than 600 items. The private contractors who built it were pointing fingers at one another. And inside the White House, after initially saying too much traffic was to blame, Mr. Obama’s closest confidants had few good answers...

Publicly, Mr. Obama had said “interest way exceeded expectations, and that’s the good news.” But in a meeting in Mr. McDonough’s office that first weekend after the start, someone asked the question on everyone’s mind: Should we just take the website down altogether for a time so it can be fixed?
Panic is the key word here. Read the full report at the Times. And note how much fun Althouse has with the story, "'Inside the West Wing, where junior researchers monitor Twitter and other social media, officials knew the political controversy had moved beyond the broken website'."

While the website is the centerpiece of ObamaCare (because its "back end" operations form the lynchpin of this Democrat-socialist health rationing system), it's just the tip of the iceberg for political recriminations, both current and forthcoming. Millions have lost their coverage on the individual health insurance market --- prompting utter fear and desperation among Congressional Democrats facing reelection next year --- but as we get deeper into the rollout next year, when insurance companies start notifying business of policy cancellations, and when employers start dumping tens of millions of workers onto the crappy cookie-cutter ClusterCare programs, all hell is indeed going to break loose, and George Will so accurately predicts.

A half a billion dollars of our money was thrown away on this P.O.S. website?

And they were ready to scrap it?

Who was fired? Who was disciplined?

And this was just the website: the actual Obamacare disaster hasn't even truly begun. What happens to the 129 million Americans who have lost or will lose their insurance?

Here's a helpful hint for John Boehner: you took 40 phony votes on repealing Obamacare.

Now take a real vote. Force Democrats in the House to make a stand.

Repeal this monstrosity and put as much pressure on the Senate Democrats as they can withstand.


1 comment:

AmPowerBlog said...

OMG! That screencap is unreal!