Are Republicans Sabotaging Obamacare with Fraudulent Websites?

Here’s the latest chapter in The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.

According to Forward Progressives:

There’s a saying that goes, “If you can’t win, cheat like hell” and it’s apparently the motto that the GOP has taken to heart across the country in their latest attempts to sabotage the Affordable Care Act.

What does their newest attempt involve? Creating fake websites with misinformation that look like state insurance exchanges in order to confuse consumers trying to find out what their new insurance options are under Obamacare.

Forward Progressives cites three websites recently shut down by the Kentucky Attorney General’s Office, including kynect101.com, which, according to the Kentucky AG, was “deceptively similar to kynect.ky.gov, Kentucky’s official health insurance exchange website….[S]ome consumers attempting to locate the site through search engines were being deceptively steered to the kynect101.com website instead of kynect.ky.gov, where they were provided false information about their options under the federal Affordable Care Act, including being informed that there were no plans with federal subsidies available to offset a portion of their insurance premiums.”

In a conspiratorial whisper, Forward Progressives blames Republicans. And what passes for proof with this crowd?

“f you were running a sabotage campaign, why not run it in a state with a fully functional health insurance exchange site and (not coincidentally) a GOP Senator who is facing a battle for re-election both from Democrats as well as from within his own party?

So apparently, as this conspiracy theory goes (if I’m following it correctly), because Kentucky is operating one of the only (mostly) functioning state exchanges in the country, Republicans, wishing to protect Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s immense Power to Control Everything have been running around creating bogus websites that would not only give Kentucky residents misinformation about their insurance options under the exchanges, but would also potentially leave their personal data in the hands of hackers. (Which, thank goodness, is totally unlike the actual Democrat-created marketplace website that gives Americans misinformation about their insurance options and leaves their personal data in the hands of hackers.) And Republicans have been doing this “across the country” according to Forward Progressives.

And you thought Bush Derangement Syndrome was bad? Progressives, usually content to wait a few years to start their revisionist history, are now revising on the fly. In their alternative reality, they’ve found a way to blame Republicans for (arguably) the most epic website failure in the history of the internet.

[Note to Sen. McConnell’s campaign: After the site was banned by the Kentucky AG, http://kynect101.com is once again available on Go Daddy for the low, low price of $69.99 plus commission.]

The problem, of course, is that whoever was in charge of creating the Obamacare website — and we may never know who that “whoever” is — didn’t have the foresight to anticipate copycat websites. They neglected to purchase potential domain names that could be mistaken for the real site, resulting in more than 700 “cyber-squatters” — fake or misleading sites with domain names similar to HealthCare.gov.

Computer anti-virus guru John McAfee told Neil Cavuto in October that there should have been a central website that was a repository for all the state and federal exchanges. “Instead,” McAfee said, “any hacker can put a website up, make it look extremely competitive and because of the nature of the system — and this is health care after all — they can ask you the most intimate questions and you’re going to freely answer them.”

He predicted widespread fraud and identity theft that would devastate millions of Americans. “What idiot put this system out there and did not create a central depository?” asked McAfee.

According to Forward Progressives, a Republican idiot who wants Obama to fail. Certainly not hackers and definitely no one of the Republican persuasion. Probably Bush.