Obama Partisans Aren’t Putting Lipstick On This Pig
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Friends, current allies and former staffers of the Barack Obama administration have delivered scathing reviews of the president’s signature health care plan website, Healthcare.gov. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius faced punishing hours of questions related to her role as architect of the website, which crashed during her testimony.
Sebelius took much of the responsibility for the disaster, but when asked whether the president bore any responsibility she responded, “Whatever, yes, he is the president.” Other Obama partisans have not been as kind.
President Obama’s top economic advisor in 2008 Austan Goolsbee stated that, “This plays into the suspicion that resides in really all Americans that, outside of narrow functions they can see and appreciate like Social Security and national parks, the government just can’t get it done.”
Former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the rollout was “bungled badly.” And he went on to say, “I hope they’re working day and night to get this done and when they get it fixed, I hope they fire some people who were in charge of making sure this thing was supposed to work. This is excruciatingly embarrassing for the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services.”
The president’s longtime campaign manager David Axelrod said that if he were at the White House he would be, “very, very tough on the people who are responsible.”
“Somebody’s got to man up here — get rid of these people,” said Rep. Rick Nolan (D-MN). And state Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Los Angeles) said, “I absolutely believe that somebody should be held accountable.”
Democratic lawmakers are signaling that they may be ready to push back the tax for not purchasing a product if Healthcare.gov doesn’t begin functioning soon. “I don’t know that the answer is to delay the mandate; the answer may be to delay the penalties,” said Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-VA).
Healthcare.gov reportedly cost over $300 million dollars and was implemented using 10-year-old technology. The data center for the site crashed last weekend, leaving people unable to register online at all. Insurers are getting faulty data that is totally unusable, which means they have no way of knowing who actually signed up for plans. No doubt the administration is working frantically behind the scenes to solve these problems before more partisans begin jumping ship before the upcoming election year.