While some have proclaimed the 36,000 enrollment [12] in The Affordable Care Act "a good start," the online marketplaces that Obamacare has become more infamous for have been plagued with problems in the brief two weeks since launch. Politico [13]provides 25 of the most telling and colorful comments made about the "glitches" the online exchanges have faced...
1. “I hope they are working day and night to get this done. When they get it fixed, I hope they fire some people that were in charge of making sure that this thing was supposed to work.” — former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs on MSNBC’s “Now with Alex Wagner,” Oct. 14 [14]
2. “A thousand Social Security numbers being sent to the wrong people is not a glitch!” — CNBC contributor Carol Roth on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Oct. 12 [15]
3. “How can we tax people for not buying a product from a website that doesn’t work?” — House Speaker John Boehner, Oct. 10 [16]
4. “Despite the widespread belief that the administration was not ready for the health law’s Oct. 1 launch, top officials and lead IT contractors looked us in the eye and assured us all systems were a go. Instead, here we are 10 days later, and delays and technical failures have reached epidemic proportions.” — Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) in a statement, Oct. 10 [17]
5. “We’re going to do a challenge. I’m going to try and download every movie ever made and you are going to try to sign up for Obamacare — and we’ll see which happens first.” — Jon Stewart to Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on "The Daily Show," Oct. 7 [18]
6. “It’s a new rule: If something doesn’t work, you get rid of it! If the post office is late today, let’s get rid of the post office! If the plane is late an hour, get rid of airplanes! It’s ridiculous!” — MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Oct. 12 [19]
7. “There’s so much wrong, you just don’t know what’s broken until you get a lot more of it fixed.” — Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini, Oct. 14 [20]
8. “They had three years to get this ready. If they weren’t fully ready, they should accept the advice Republicans are giving them: Delay it for a year, get it ready and make sure it works.” — CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Oct. 9 [21]
9. “I heard that [the website] had over 8 million hits — people that have tried to sign up — and so far they have people in the single digits that have signed up.” — Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), Oct. 9 [22]
10. “The shutdown has completely gotten in the way of the message of Obamacare not working. If there were no government shutdown, Republicans could train all their fire on the failures of the exchanges in a ‘See, I told you so’ approach.” — Republican strategist Ron Bonjean, Oct. 1 [23]
11. “The fact that there is any disruption in the website is inexcusable. But I think the attention is being diverted from the slowness of the website to the fact that we’re in this financial crisis.” — Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), Oct. 10 [24].
12. “Basically, HHS has screwed this whole thing up.” — Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), Oct. 9 [25]
13. “Consider that just a couple of weeks ago, Apple rolled out a new mobile operating system, and within days, they found a glitch, so they fixed it. I don’t remember anybody suggesting Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads or threatening to shut down the company if they didn’t.” — President Barack Obama, Oct. 1 [26]
14. “If Apple launched a major new product that functioned as badly as Obamacare’s online insurance marketplace, the tech world would be calling for Tim Cook’s head.” — Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas in The Washington Post Wonkblog, Oct. 4 [27]
15. “It’s bad enough that Sebelius and Co. produced a terrible taxpayer-funded product. It’s even worse that they didn’t heed the warnings or spot the red flags. They put on a smile, flipped the switch and sat by as it crashed…[T]he first person fired should be Secretary Sebelius.” — RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, Oct. 15 [28]
16. “The secretary does have the full confidence of the president. She, like everyone else in this effort, is focused on our No. 1 priority, which is making the implementation of the Affordable Care Act work well. People are working 24/7 to address the problems and isolate them and fix them, when it comes to the website and enrollment issues.” — Press secretary Jay Carney, Oct. 15 [29]
17. “If the problems persist another three or four weeks, those at the back of the line will not have coverage.” — Dan Schuyler, consultant who helped design a health insurance exchange in Utah, Oct. 11 [30]
18. “If we are already running into issues at the user account stage, we’re going to run into a lot more issues when we get to the more complex operations at the [subsidy] eligibility determination.” — Dan Schuyler, consultant who helped design a health insurance exchange in Utah, Oct. 11 [30]
19. “The volume obviously is a factor: For the first day or two, it worked. A week and a half later, it’s no longer an adequate explanation.” — Washington and Lee University School of Law professor Tim Jost, Oct. 12 [31]
20. “In retrospect, they should have said to the public before Oct. 1, 'This is going to take a while; give us some time and wait.'” — John Rother, president of the National Coalition on Health Care, Oct. 12 [31]
21. “It is not unique that when you have a very large, new software program come out that people work to clean it up.” — Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, Oct. 6 [32]
22. “[It’s] pretty clear that they’re working on the glitches in Obamacare, and it’s pretty clear that we need a geek squad for the website, not a firing squad for the entire bill.” — Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Oct. 10 [33]
23. “In eight weeks, we will find out what the cause was and work it out with the help of HHS and the Small Business Administration, to make it easier to enroll.” — Rep. Rubén Hinojosa (D-Texas), Oct. 10 [24]
24. “This week, Sebelius continued wasting taxpayer dollars on advertising and promotional tours. This included failed rallies at NFL stadiums and appearances on comedy shows to promote enrollment while at the same time, Americans were unable to sign up for health care plans as promised. Even Jon Stewart didn’t think it was a laughing matter.” — Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), Oct. 11 [34]
25. “[It’s] like trying to repair a car while someone is driving it.” — George Edwards, computer scientist, to FoxNews.com, Oct. 10 [16]
We are sure this will all end well with the administration declaring some kind of "victory"... though that last quote seems to ring extremely true of every government plan we have seen in the last decade or 10...