If Churchill were alive today, he would probably characterize the rollout of Obamacare as a humiliation, wrapped in an embarrassment, inside a mockery-punching bag injury. And overnight, in addition to all the other well-known gremlins that have plagued America's socialized healthcare from Day 1, insult was added injury, following a Reuters report that a "data center critical for allowing uninsured Americans to buy health coverage under President Barack Obama's healthcare law went down on Sunday, halting online enrollment for all 50 states."
In other words, on top of and in addition to all the other bad coding and website processing issues that have been exposed and promptly scapegoated on other (you see Obama knew all about the successes, but nothing about the failures of Obamacare), now the internet itself is starting to glitch up. Which is hardly surprising considering Al Gore's involvement in the latter.
More from Reuters [9]:
The data center operated by Verizon's Terremark experienced a connectivity issue that caused it to shut down, affecting the federal government's already problem-plagued online marketplace Healthcare.gov and similar sites operated by 14 states and the District of Columbia, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Obama administration and company officials could not say how long it would take to fix the connectivity problem.
The outage that started in the early hours of Sunday caused the data center to lose network connectivity with the federal government's data services hub, an electronic traffic roundabout that links the online health insurance marketplaces with numerous federal agencies and can verify people's identity, citizenship, and other facts.
Without the hub, consumers are unable to apply online for coverage or determine their eligibility for federal subsidies to help pay for insurance premiums. On Saturday, Sebelius praised the hub's ability to perform complex calculations in quick time as an example of a successful segment of the system.
HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters said Sebelius spoke with Verizon's chief executive officer on Sunday afternoon to discuss the situation: "They committed to fixing the problem as soon as possible."
The outage was affecting enrollment in all 50 states, as well as Terremark customers not connected with the marketplaces, according to the HHS spokeswoman. She said the data center's network connectivity went down during planned maintenance to replace a failed networking component.
A spokesman for Verizon said the problem would be fixed "as soon as possible." "Our engineers have been working with HHS and other technology companies to identify and address the root cause of the issue," Verizon spokesman Jeff Nelson said.
Putting this in context:
The administration has expressed confidence it can fix underlying problems with Healthcare.gov by early December, in time for people to meet a December 15 deadline to enroll in new health plans to receive benefits on January 1. Further delays would jeopardize its ability to enroll as many as 7 million Americans for coverage during Obamacare's first year.
Whether or not Verizon fixes the glitch any time soon, or merely lets it linger, one thing is becoming obvious: the Obamacare delay, which was hard fought by the Teaparty, and which was so opposed by the administration leading to the grotesque 16 day government shutdown, has all but become a reality with every passing day. Only instead of someone actually taking responsibility, said delay will be scapegoated on Verizon's data centers, faulty fiber-optic and copper cables, Cisco switches, Syrian hackers, millions of lines of faulty (Fortran?) code, inept contractors, end users who never read the Help.doc file, and everyone and everything else. Just never the government itself.