Government. It moves slowly...very slowly. But it moves. And when it is ready to act, it screws up the implementation. Period. Every time.
Posted on 10/23/2013 9:51:32 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Recently, I was talking to a congressional Democrat who was fully confident that Obamacare would cease to be an effective Republican issue by November 2014. Plenty of Democrats agree; plenty of Republicans, too. This was something Ted Cruz kept worrying about, into live mics—September 2013 was the "last chance" to defund Obamacare because the law would become more popular once exchanges started and subsidies started flowing like cheap wine at your cousin Andre's wedding reception.
What worried this Democrat? A healthcare.gov imbroglio lasting more than a few weeks. If that was all it took? Fine. If it took months, rolling into 2014? Well. That was a problem that reset Democratic gains from the shutdown.
I had this in mind when I read the transcript of CNN's interview of Kathleen Sebelius, conducted by Sanjay Gupta, who was considered as the Obama administration's surgeon general. (He passed because CNN-->executive branch is a serious pay cut.) Several times Sebelius hinted at how damn long it would take for the Best and Brightest coders to dig out.*
1) "If we had an ideal situation and could have built the product in, you know, a five-year period of time, we probably would have taken five years. But we didn’t have five years."
2) "The issue is, will people be able to sign up for affordable health care in the six months' open enrollment period?"
3) "We anticipated at the outset that everyone would never use the website. That needs to be part of the opportunity."
That last answer borders on gibberish, but I guess the secretary is trying to say she expected more people to call in? To sign up via in-person navigators? Either way, she's saying that the problems were forseeable, and that they'll last. She's dug in for a couple weeks of battering from House Republicans........
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
They don’t worry me.
This is how bad this administration is. The phone number to enroll in ACA (can be verified by visiting healthcare.gov’s site), is (800) 318-2596. Now, look at your phone’s keypad. The 1 isn’t assigned any letters, but the remaining letters spell out exactly what this administration thinks of the proles. F(1)U-**YO or F U-**YO. That can’t be coincidence.
It’s not just the front-end website, it is also the many hook-ins to the various Fed databases and to the insurance companies.
The government.
Ohhhh you were serious when you hired us to build a website?
Our website on Friday morning was flaky on the search engine tool so we just outsourced the work to India. Finished in 1 hour. What do you expect from the nincompoop p-resident?
Of course. Five years is still ridiculous.
I read the op-ed article on slate and the entire thing reads like gibberish.
If sebilius and gang couldn’t get the site built in 3.5 years then they could not do it in 10 years or ever for that matter.
Obama’s signature failure.
Translation of gibberish:
This isn’t going to blow over in a few weeks.
This is going to hurt Democrats in upcoming elections.
It’s all about THEM all the time! Always!
Do you prefer FORTRAN or BASIC?
I think they code in 0’s and 1’s.
Government. It moves slowly...very slowly. But it moves. And when it is ready to act, it screws up the implementation. Period. Every time.
Five Year Plan? Uhm, rings a historical bell.
This phone number is absolutely not a coincidence. It is Obama or someone in his administration sticking their middle finger up in the public’s face and telling then that they are “f**ked” with this ObamaCare mess.
Just think of the odds of randomly selecting these numbers for the help line for ObamaCare. They would be astronomical. Someone did this on purpose. No doubt about it. You could not have this happen by happenstance in your wildest dreams. I was done deliberately and by design.
One wonders why that once this phone number spelling message got out into the media, that the White House hasn’t changed the number to avoid the embarrassment and poor optics. The reason they haven’t after their little middle finger flip to the American public got out, is that they are doubling down on the number, even having Obama repeating the phone number several times in his speech in the Rose Garden.
This F**K YO phone number is indicative of what Obama and those that work in his administration think of the American people. Just think about it. This is not the first time Obama’s policies have screwed the American public and unfortuantely for the country, it won’t be the last. God help us.
Algol...:^)
Remarks by the President Before Meeting with Cabinet Members
Cabinet Room11:17 A.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: Well, obviously we’re missing a few members of our Cabinet here today. In particular, John Kerry is overseas meeting on a topic that we’ve been spending a lot of time on over the last several weeks -- the situation in Syria and how we can make sure that chemical weapons are not used against innocent people.
I am hopeful that the discussions that Secretary Kerry had with Foreign Minister Lavrov as well as some of the other players in this can yield a concrete result. And I know that he is going to be working very hard over the next several days to see what the possibilities are there.
But even as we have been spending a lot of time on the Syria issue and making sure that international attention is focused on the horrible tragedy that occurred there, it is still important to recognize that we’ve got a lot more stuff to do here in this government.
The American people are still interested in making sure that our kids are getting the kind of education they deserve; that we’re putting people back to work; that we are dealing properly with a federal budget; that bills are getting paid on time; that the full faith and credit of the United States is preserved; and that the federal government itself is, in every single agency, running the way it should and making sure that our constituents and the American people are getting a good deal.
So we’re going to spend some time here today talking about all the efforts that have been made by many of these Cabinet secretaries to streamline operations, to cut out waste, to improve performance, to improve customer satisfaction. We’re going to focus on some specific issues, including managing some of the budget debates that are going to be taking place over the next several weeks.
We’re going to be talking about the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, where we’ve seen some tremendous progress over the last several months and are confident that starting at the beginning of next month, people are going to be able to start signing up for health care -- in many cases, for the first time. And we’re going to spend some time talking about issues like comprehensive immigration reform that are still of enormous importance to ensure that America grows.
So I appreciate all the great work that people have done. Some of the Cabinet members here are still relatively new, but thanks to their confirmations and the great teams they put around them, I know that they’re hitting the ground running.
Thank you very much, everybody.
END
11:20 A.M. EDT
Somebody should ask Obama EXACTLY what was discussed about the ObamaCare roll-out during this Cabinet meeting last month, and why he's frustrated and surprised about it now? What did Secretary Sebelius say to him then? Did she mislead the President in front of all the other Cabinet Secretaries? What does Obama plan to do about it now that he knows that he and his Cabinet were lied to by one of his Secretaries?
-PJ
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