From Breaking News at NY Times:
President Obama declared Monday that “nobody is madder than me” about the failures of the government’s health care Web site, but said the technical problems do not indicate a broader failure of the Affordable Care Act.
“We did not wage this long and contentious battle just around a Web site. That’s not what this was about,” Mr. Obama told supporters during 25-minute remarks in the Rose Garden.
That the president even had to say this tells us more about the laziness of the main stream media than it does about the technical shortcomings of a web site.
The Department of Health and Human Services accepts blame for the glitchiness of the web site and is beefing up their technical staff to address it head on:
Over the past two and a half weeks, millions of Americans visited HealthCare.gov to look at their new health care options under the Affordable Care Act. In that time, nearly half a million applications for coverage have been submitted from across the nation. This tremendous interest – with over 19 million unique visits to date to HealthCare.gov- confirms that the American people are looking for quality, affordable health coverage, and want to find it online.
Unfortunately, the experience on HealthCare.gov has been frustrating for many Americans. Some have had trouble creating accounts and logging in to the site, while others have received confusing error messages, or had to wait for slow page loads or forms that failed to respond in a timely fashion. The initial consumer experience of HealthCare.gov has not lived up to the expectations of the American people. We are committed to doing better. […]
To ensure that we make swift progress, and that the consumer experience continues to improve, our team has called in additional help to solve some of the more complex technical issues we are encountering.
Our team is bringing in some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government to scrub in with the team and help improve HealthCare.gov. We’re also putting in place tools and processes to aggressively monitor and identify parts of HealthCare.gov where individuals are encountering errors or having difficulty using the site, so we can prioritize and fix them. We are also defining new test processes to prevent new issues from cropping up as we improve the overall service and deploying fixes to the site during off-peak hours on a regular basis.
Translation: “We know we had problems, we worked to fix them, and we are going to apply more fixes going forward.”
Facebook was down for a short while this morning, which makes it a complete and utter failure.
But thank goodness Twitter was up:
stages of gop obamcare grief:
1. obamacare is unconstitutional
2. … is legal but bad
3. … is killing liberty
4. … is too hard to get— Oliver Willis (@owillis) October 20, 2013
You know how long you'd wait to get online to buy affordable health care under the GOP plan? A lifetime (which would be rather short).
— John Aravosis (@aravosis) October 18, 2013