Posted on 10/11/2013 8:40:52 AM PDT by Servant of the Cross
Kathleen Sebelius came to Pittsburgh yesterday to team up with Steelers chairman Dan Rooney to promote the newly launched ObamaCare exchanges. Maybe she should have tried the Denver Broncos. The promotion flopped as badly as the Steelers in their first four weeks of the season, thanks to the $634 million website that can’t make a play:
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius had a front-row view of the problems plaguing the website that the government established to allow people to shop for health insurance under Obamacare.
Sebelius and Steelers Chairman Dan Rooney were at an enrollment and education event on Thursday at Heinz Field to promote Healthcare.gov, but people who showed up encountered problems in signing up for coverage on the website. …
“Believe me, we had some early glitches,” said Sebelius, who was introduced by Rooney, a backer of the law. “But it’s getting better every day.”
At the back of the room, it was a different story. About 20 people armed with laptops and certified by the government to sign up people for coverage were meeting with uninsured people, answering questions and fruitlessly trying to access the website.
LaKesha Lowry, 41, came to the event to find out about her health insurance options. But the North Side resident said she was not able to access the site, even with the help of a certified application counselor.
“It said, ‘Try again later,’ ” Lowry said.
Sebelius tried blaming Heinz Field, which probably didn’t make Rooney happy but might give Steelers fans another excuse for the 2013 season:
Asked about the ongoing problems with the website and the fact that people at a government enrollment event couldn’t sign up, Sebelius told reporters that she didn’t know what problems were affecting service at Heinz Field. The government has made hardware and software upgrades to improve the site, she said, and it is working for many people.
Define “many.” So far, they’ve managed to sign up as many subscribers for insurance in a little over a week as the average daily traffic of an upper-level independent blog. They’ve managed to handle 13 million hits in nine days, according to Sebelius’ comments in Pittsburgh, which works out to our daily traffic level in October 2012, and we weren’t tossing out a bunch of 404s at the time. Oh, and one other thing — we weren’t imposing a mandate on all Americans to read us or pay a fine through the IRS, so bragging about traffic levels is more than just a little dishonest.
Here’s a pro-tip for Sebelius: Don’t do on-site signup events until the site can handle them, and don’t blame your host for your own website’s incompetent engineering. Even the Steelers aren’t going to cotton to being that much of a doormat.
They better do something fast about this. People might be willing to try two or three times, but after that, they will just walk away.
That they somehow managed to sign up even 51,000 is nothing less than a sheer miracle.
The cost of the $634 million website could have paid for a whole year of a $50/month prescription subsidy for nearly $1.1 million people. Are those costs being figured into the cost of Obamacare?
except Heinz Field is another government boondoggle....DOH!
The Rooneys are doing their best to make me no longer root for the Steelers.
anyone have that pic of Tom Daschle sitting alone and dejected on a folding chair?
When she blamed the Wi-Fi at Heinz field, you just know some smartass yelled, “but I’m on youporn right now, and it’s working fine.”
Steelers: Obama’s team.
Looks like karma has finally bit them in the @ss.
Get ready for the thuper liberal ACORN activist ACA campaign train to embark. We have illegal immigrants who will say “i was getting paid cash from one of those cheap rich Republicans and I fell off a ladder and found out I can’t get treated because I don’t have ACA”, old grandpas in wheelchairs who can’t a new leg implant because my doctor is an evil old rich Republican doctor and he won’t accept me because I’m in the ACA orogram, and children ready to stumble and fall and say, “i can’t get treatment because my mom won’t enroll in the ACA because she’s a Christian and she says they will force her to take the mark of the beast and we will go to Hell...waaaah”
Obama will then step into the picture and say’ “there’s an easy solution and it’s so cheap it’s practically free; sign up today” with a wink
When Kathleen Sebelius leaves office she will reprise her role in the Obama administration by starring in a new production of C. S. Lewis’ “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.” Her role, for which she has been grooming herself the past few years, is that of the White Queen who rules a land “where it is always winter but never Christmas,” and where killing children is her royal administration’s goal. The Nobel committee reportedly has urged the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to award her the Oscar for best performance by a woman in a leading role immediately in anticipation of the magnitude of her coming achievement. It is further rumored that Barack Obama has been tapped to direct the production.
+100
Pure awesomeness
At check-in, they told us we'd have to discard our bags because only see through type bags were allowed as a security measure. It was all over the news, they told us, didn't we see the news?
Mine was about a $2 canvas job and I was willing to discard it as instructed but, thankfully, my wife was not. Hers was a little more expensive and neither of us relished the joys of stuffing the contents into our pockets or trying to juggle them with two hands.
"Why can't you just take a quick look in the bags like they do at PNC Park?" I asked.
"We have our rules," said the hired Barney Fife, "you need to lose the bags to get in."
"Go do something to yourself which is anatomically impossible!", said I, "We're not going to attend another event at Heinz Field so long as such an asinine rule is in place."
We walked out and promptly sold the tickets to the nearest scalper. We got enough to pay for our parking, the trip into Pittsburgh and a nice dinner for two.
“That they somehow managed to sign up even 51,000 is nothing less than a sheer miracle.”
I’d like to see some proof of this. These thugs lie all the time.
The answer to that is the NFL is now in the business of selling see-thru bags with the team logos at all of their Fan Gear stores.
I give baseball 2 yrs. tops before they catch on and do likewise.
Karma has bitten a few other teams Barricade Obama had ties to. Former UNC basketball players were in Obama campaign ads and he played pickup games with the team before their last run to the National Championship. The sports program has had a run of scandals with indictments, transitions of leadership and resignations.
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