'If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.'
- P.J. O'Rourke
If CNN was doing its best this morning to prove that the second coming of healthcare.gov is fixed, it... failed.
Transcript:
GEORGE HOWELL, HOST: We know the first thing you have to do when you go to this website you have to select your state. Is that working?
ALISON KOSIK, CNN BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: And what's funny is I was talking with Matt, and, yeah, that seemed to work, right, when you logged on. But then came the road blocks. So tell me about what happened, because we're getting another error message here, and it's supposed to be running smoothly. We’re just not seeing that.
MATT SLOANE, CNN MEDICAL PRODUCER: Yeah, so, you know, we've been trying to get into the site since October 1 on and off again. I have to say it did work a lot more smoothly this morning. I got through. I picked my state. I put in all of my information and I got through the whole process in eight minutes. And then it said my status was in progress. So I went to refresh it and I got the error message.
But fear not. According to David Plouffe, 2008 campaign manager for Barack Obama, Obamacare "will work reall well"... by 2017. To wit:
This program was designed to be implemented by the states. And in most of the states it is going quite well. You talked about Medicaid expansion. I think it's just a fact, and it may take until 2017 when this president leaves office, you're going to see almost every state in this country running their own exchanges eventually and expanding Medicaid. And I think it'll work really well, then.