That’s how Robert Gibbs describes the disastrous Obamacare rollout:
Ezra is equally blunt:
We’re now negative 14 days until the Affordable Care Act and most people still can’t purchase insurance. The magnitude of this failure is stunning. Yes, the federal health-care law is a complicated project, government IT rules are a mess, and the scrutiny has been overwhelming. But the Obama administration knew all that going in. They should’ve been able to build an online portal that works.
To my mind, it’s by far the biggest error Obama has made since taking office. To bungle the rollout of his core domestic initiative is unforgivable. To have known about it long before and kept quiet is inexcusable. To offer no real explanation or to take any serious responsibility is governmental malpractice. At some point, the president has to reassert control and explain what has gone so horribly wrong and chart a course for correction. Those responsible must be fired. McArdle thinks the government took far too long to begin building the website:
I’m a longtime critic of federal contracting rules, which prevent some corruption at ruinous expense in money, quality and speed. But federal contracting rules are not what made the administration delay writing the rules and specifications necessary to build the system until 2013. Nor to delay the deadline for states to declare whether they’d be building an exchange, in the desperate hope that a few more governors might decide — in February 2013! — to build a state system after all. Any state that decided to start such a project at that late date would have had little hope of building anything that worked, but presumably angry voters would be calling the governor instead of HHS.
Suderman examines the enrollment window:
Obama administration officials are downplaying problems, and framing current troubles as a rocky start that won’t necessarily doom a six-month enrollment project. Open enrollment, they note, doesn’t actually end until March 31 of 2014.
But in order for Obamacare to have any chance of success, the exchanges will need to be functional long before then. In order for coverage to start on January 1, individuals will have to complete applications by December 15. And in order to avoid the law’s penalty for remaining uninsured, they’ll have to be enrolled by February 15 of next year—not the end of March.
In other words, the administration doesn’t really have six months to fix problems with the exchanges. Political pressure will build well before the end of March.
Previous Dish on the disastrous web-launch here.
The Dish 