“Frustrated by trying to register on HealthCare.gov?” asks Consumer Reports. “You’re hardly alone. Of the 9.47 million people who tried to register in the first week, only 271,00 were able to create an account, according to one analysis. That’s about 1 in 35. Many people couldn’t even create user names and passwords.”
Let us pause here to note that ObamaCare apologists and Administration flacks have been deliberately creating a lot of confusion about the metrics for measuring Healthcare.gov’s failure. As difficult as “creating an account” is, you’re not even halfway to actually purchasing an insurance policy if you can getthat to work.
The pathetic White House spin machine began frantically re-Tweeting a declaration from New Yorker‘s Ryan Lizza that he managed to create an account without too much trouble… then utterly ignored his follow-up messages less than an hour later that he still couldn’t get Obama’s crapware to do anything butcreate an account. Half the Administration was trumpeting Lizza as the harbinger of a new dawn, while he was patiently trying to inform them that “Healthcare.gov is still broken.” He even sent a personal update directly to White House spokesman Jay Carney, who was busy high-fiving himself and passing around the earlier message about successful account creation, but was resolutely ignored.
So Consumer Reports enlisted a professional software tester to provide the kind of advice that makes normal people tear their hair out when they’re fighting with a poorly-written pile of steaming garbage: Clear your cookies! Follow the poorly-written on-screen instructions! Refresh your inbox every ten seconds to see if there’s an activation email yet! “Don’t believe all the status and error messages that you see on the screen – they may not always match reality!” (That’s a direct quote.)
But the best advice of all is to stay away from Barack Obama’s billion-dollar disaster for month or longer, until they manage to achieve some minimal level of functionality. “Hopefully that will be long enough for its software vendors to clean up the mess they’ve made,” says Consumer Reports wistfully.
Yes, and if you hesitate the pay the gigantic bill these incompetent Obama cronies will present for repair services on a website that never should have been launched, the President will compare you to a “deadbeat diner.” And don’t count on a month being nearly enough time to squash all the bugs. Even Senator Max “Train Wreck” Baucus says it’ll take more like two months, and as Forbes noted this morning, analysts who have been poring over the Healthcare.gov disaster think even that’s wildly optimistic, because it’s looking more like a complete rewrite will be necessary. If anything like that happens, the work people have already invested in trying to get signed up for ObamaCare will be completely wasted.
The problem, as we’ve been discussing here at The Conversation lately, is that if the young chumps wait a month or longer to get fleeced by their sky-high ObamaCare premiums, the whole rotten scheme will collapse into a death spiral that begins devouring insurance companies. That’s been the Left’s plan all along, of course – single payer socialized medicine, here we come! – but it wasn’t supposed to happen this fast.
HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is expressing resistance to testifying before Congress about this debacle. Her refusal to testify should be accepted as her letter of resignation, with a lifetime ban on all future government service, and criminal charges to follow. We should do the same to every single one of her thousands of subordinates across the vast HHS bureaucracy until we get to someone willing to testify honestly about how all this happened.
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