Posted on 10/21/2013 9:30:50 PM PDT by lbryce
President Obama offered an impassioned defense of the Affordable Care Act on Monday, acknowledging the technical failures of the HealthCare.gov Web site, but providing little new information about the problems with the online portal or the efforts by government contractors to fix it.
With Republican critics seizing on the Web site’s issues as evidence of deeper flaws in the health care law, Mr. Obama sought to deflect attention from the continuing problems by focusing on ways to get coverage without going online. Like a TV pitchman, the president urged viewers to call the government’s toll-free number for health insurance, acknowledging that “the wait times probably might go up a little bit now.”
In remarks in the Rose Garden, Mr. Obama acknowledged serious technical issues with the Web site, declaring that “no one is madder than me.” He offered no new information about how many people have managed to enroll since the online exchanges opened on Oct. 1. And he did not address questions about who, if anyone, might be held responsible for the failure.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
That would be the American people.
Why didn’t he blame this one in a YouTube video?
Yup! The Mad Hater.
He’s mad alright. Mad as a hatter.
“he wanted to find out who was responsible for it so he could ‘kick some ass’”
He wanted to blame someone so he could STEAL 20 billion from a company and its shareholders.
Good grief. Now msnbc is claiming they only had 9 months to put the website together instead of over 3 years.
I believe it. By the time they hired the vendors and wrote the cockamamie technical requirements that’s all the time they had left. And it shows.
<<< declaring that “no one is madder than me.” >>>
A competent executive in charge of a massive project like this would have been “mad” a year ago when the project was under development. And I suspect the 16,000 FedEx employees whose spouse no longer has health insurance are “madder” than this incompetent fool.
And just what would be Obama’s (or Romney’s) explanation for a government takeover of the key functions of health insurance sales and marketing at the cost of government coercion and billions of dollars in taxpayer funding?
I disagree with the Medicaid expansion, the subsidies, the new minimum coverage requirements, and the mandates.
But for the life of me I can’t see a justification for this monstrosity. I suppose it would have to do with the insurance of the high-cost uninsured with preexisting conditions, but surely that could be covered by subsidies to insurance companies who take them on, or, as I believe Massachusetts had before Romneycare, state-level high-risk pools such as for high-risk drivers with auto insurance.
All the other stuff, the steering to Medicaid, the new coverage requirements, the tax penalties on those who can’t, say, file a record of insurance with their taxes, could certainly have been layered onto the existing system, law by law.
Obama doesn’t have to explain anything, because the media doesn’t ask. Can you recall a tough question in the last 5 years?
You’ve got that just right—because the media doesn’t ask.
But they did ask Romney and responded with full blather about having a ‘marketplace’ where people could shop for coverage from different insurance providers—as if we hadn’t had free markets to start with.
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