Last week, the Obama administration said it would be “a few weeks” before they could tell us how many Americans signed up for their fancy health care takeover plan, Obamacare. Over the weekend, the government took the Obamacare exchanges offline. Then Sunday, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew refused again to answer a simple question: How many Americans have signed up for Obamacare?
“I’m going to ask you one last time,” said Wallace, “because, forgive me sir, you haven’t answered it: do you not know how many people signed up, which would seem to indicate another major software glitch, or is it that the numbers are embarrassingly small?”
“Chris, our metric for this week was, could people get online, get the information they need to make an informed,” said Lew, sidestepping the straightforward question. “They have been getting that information. We are confident that they are going to make the decision — they have 6 months to make the decision.”
Even by that metric, the Obamacare administration had a bad week. People couldn’t get to the sites. Some states just ended up taking their exchange sites down.
I’ve run websites that include mechanisms for accounts, sign-ins, donations, and so forth. While they were nowhere near as big (or screwed up) as the Obamacare exchanges, they worked, and if anyone asked me how many of what we had going on, it would generally take me just a few minutes to hand over that data. Again, I’m not making a direct apples-to-apples comparison here, because the Obamacare sites are quite complex, just noting that web sites produce digital data — database files — that should be accessible fairly quickly. It shouldn’t take weeks to get it. In fact, quick access would benefit the administration — if the sign-ups are strong, they could proudly pound their chest about their law’s popularity. If the numbers are weak, they could blame the opening glitches, or blame the Republicans as is their wont on every other issue, and encourage more sign-ups. The fact that they can’t do either one is odd.
My point is, if these exchange sites were built competently at all, it shouldn’t take weeks to determine how many Americans have signed up through them. Why, then, are they telling us that it will take weeks to figure this out? The sign-up numbers are the most obvious question anyone will ask, right after “Why are these web sites so crappy, unfinished and unstable?”
Let’s flash back to 2008, and Lord Barack Obama’s first glorious run to serve the people.
Turns out that “Doodad Pro” and “Good Will” are not the only phony contributors to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. The New York Times finally bestirred itself to apply some basic investigative journalism attention to the Democratic presidential nominee’s donor list. The Times found nearly 3,000 other questionable donors like “Jgtj Jfggjjfgj” and “Dirty West” after what the paper admitted was just a cursory look at the Illinois senator’s September financial filings. But then Times reporters Michael Luc and Griff Palmer revealed an incredible level of naivety by stating “it is unclear why someone making a political donation would want to enter a false name.”
Unclear? What other motive could there be for using a phony name and a nonexistent address to make multiple small donations using a single credit card than to evade U.S. election laws? Such journalistic gullibility may explain why bloggers have been on this story for months and the Times is only now noticing. . . . The FEC’s primary job is to protect the integrity of our federal election process. With this many red flags flying and barely three week left before election day, there’s no time to lose if voters are to have all the information at hand before casting their ballots.
Those questions about the first Obama campaign’s illegal donations were never really pursued. The questions about his second glorious campaign were never answered, either. The hole through which illegal donations were allowed to pass wasn’t quite attended to. Our man in the UK proved it.
The administration’s delay on Obamacare numbers makes me wonder — are the numbers weaker than they expected, or is fraud being built into the numbers? Not foreign fraud, necessarily, just fraud of the type that Obama’s glorious regime encourages on its donations, on welfare, the Obamaphones, and so forth.
Did Doodad Pro sign up for the bronze, silver, or gold plan?
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