We know now that the Obamacare website didn’t pass inspection nor live up to simple, rudimentary standards before Team Obama’s brain trust launched it. But this is stunning. We now know, too, that there was a zero percent chance that the website could possibly have worked as designed on Day One, let alone met the demands of the tens of millions of Americans trying to enroll in the marketplaces. Zero.
So why then didn’t they just postpone the launch date? In my view, the political backlash from delaying the rollout could have been a bit easier to weather than trying to spin reports like these:
The problem-plagued ObamaCare website was only equipped to handle 1,100 users a day before it was launched, documents released by the House Oversight and Reform Committee reveal.
The Obama administration has repeatedly insisted that the website’s repeated crashes were due to unexpectedly high traffic. U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park said on Oct. 6 that the website was expected to draw around 60,000 simultaneous users but instead drew many more, around 250,000.
However, a Healthcare.gov testing bulletin from Sept. 30, the day before the site’s launch, states that the website began to run into trouble with far fewer users.
“Currently we are able to reach 1,100 users before response time gets too high,” the bulletin states.
Not true, according to the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Another day, another lie exposed.
Obamacare supporters, meanwhile, insist that these complications will eventually sort themselves out. Don’t worry about the glitches, they say. Once you've enrolled successfully in the program, you won't even remember how painful it was signing up in the first place. But it’s important to remember that this was no mere oversight. Government documents effectively prove that a conscious decision was made by someone in this administration to rollout HealthCare.gov -- even though all evidence suggested the launch itself would go disastrously. Question: Was refusing to come to terms with reality really worth experiencing “a crisis of confidence,” as one Democratic Senator so memorably put it? I wonder.