Chaos and Corruption in Obama's Washington
Judicial Watch
How many people signed up for Obamacare after "the great reveal" last week? Simple question, yes? One that the Obama administration should be able to answer quite easily, given its technical sophistication and unprecedented ability to collect and analyze data of all kinds.
"You know, they have six months to sign up. This is a big decision. We never-"
"How many signed up?" Wallace asked again.
"I don't have the exact number, but the question isn't how many -- the question --
"Do you have any number?" Wallace asked. "Because the government has refused to tell us how many."
"It's the wrong question. It's the wrong question," Lew said.
"No it isn't," Wallace replied.
"The right question--" Lew said, but again, Wallace cut him off.
"The question is, how many people have actually signed up?" Wallace asked.
"Chris, we know that people take time to make important decisions like this. They go on(line), they compare their options. The fact that so many millions of people rushed to get information is a very good sign."
"The answer is they couldn't," Wallace said.
I'll spare you the rest as it went on like this for some time. It took a newspaper based in another country to get the answer about how many signed up. London's Daily Mail broke the news that only 51,000 were able to "apply" for insurance on the failing Obamacare government web sites.
Some in the liberal press did their best to provide cover. The Washington Post called the effort to track the data "tricky business." While Mother Jones said it doesn't even matter how many people signed up, but then parroted the Post's excuse: "...getting lots of uninsured people into private health plans...is maddeningly difficult and time-consuming," writer Stephanie Mencimer complained.
The only reason the number "doesn't matter" to the Left is because the number is embarrassingly low. You can bet if the number represented good news for the president, it would have been on the tip of the tongue of every Obama administration spokesperson throughout the federal leviathan - and page-one material for the liberal press.
But that wasn't the big news during the Obamacare launch. No, the headline was the fact that people couldn't sign up even if they wanted to due to a massive breakdown in the system: a problem that has yet to be fixed! "The second week of Obamacare enrollment started a lot like the first: with error messages," reported Politico.
The Obama administration deployed senior officials over the weekend to emphasize that problems on the enrollment site, HealthCare.gov, were primarily the result of intense interest from prospective enrollees. But their claims were undercut by a Sunday evening Wall Street Journal report claiming serious design flaws in the system's infrastructure.
According to The Associated Press, the system was "drawing lots of rotten tomatoes" with only 1 in 10 reported successes on the system. CBS This Morning reported that media outlets are having a difficult time finding anyone who has actually been successful (and I'm sure it's not for lack of trying). One computer programmer summed it up: "It wasn't designed well, it wasn't implemented well, and it looks like nobody tested it." (Digital Trends called the system a "befuddled beast" noting that the website alone cost $634 million. By way of comparison it took Facebook six years to receive $600 million in operating funds.)
Even liberal political activist John Stewart, typically an apologist for all things Obama, made a mockery of the Obamacare launch during a "cringeworthy" interview with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius this week: "I'm gonna try and download every movie ever made," The Daily Show host quipped, "and you're gonna try and sign up for Obamacare-and we'll see which happens first."
We already know that Obamacare makes a mockery of the rule of law. See, for instance, our lawsuit for Dr. Larry Kawa's Kawa Orthodontics, LLP trying to get Obama to follow his own darn healthcare law.
Now it is clear Obama isn't following his own law because he can't make it work. This is no surprise to constitutional conservatives who understand that the markets for health care are exceedingly complex and can't be managed by socialists in Washington.
Tom Fitton
President