The long-awaited opening of Obamacare was accompanied today by the long-threatened closing of the federal government,” CBS reported Tuesday.
There were major problems all over the country. Websites were slow or crashed altogether, leaving a lot of folks angry and frustrated.
As Examiner noted Tuesday, the White House blog already posted a message blaming Congress for the administration's system failure.
Due to Congress’s failure to pass legislation to fund the government, the information on this web site may not be up to date. Some submissions may not be processed, and we may not be able to respond to your inquiries.
However -- while CBS is apparently coordinating to push the president’s message – that Congress, not his administration, is to blame -- The Washington Post noted Tuesday, “the problems on the Web sites were not caused by staffing shortages due to the government shutdown because most of the government employees involved with the law’s implementation were not furloughed.”
As Examiner explained: “The propaganda system works that way.”
CBS also quoted Obama saying the system crash “gives you a sense of how important this is to millions of Americans around the country, and that's a good thing."
Mediaite reported Tuesday that Department of Health and Human Resources Secretary Kathleen Sebelius also thinks the "glitches" are “a great problem to have."
Wrong – on so many fronts.
The August Kaiser Family Foundation survey -- “conducted in conjunction with NBC News" and touted on NBC's Monday kick-off of a week-long series designed "to help Obamacare get off its feet" -- showed that a majority of Americans are more “worried” and “confused” than “enthusiastic” about Obamacare being “a good thing.”
Most are afraid the main provisions of the health reform law will end up costing them more money.
As Examiner already noted Aug. 19, Obamacare had already proven to be “a 'clumsy monstrosity' of broken promises, delays and waivers.”“
Before the July 4th holiday,” Senate Republican Policy Committee Chairman John Barrasso said in a July 11 statement, “the Obama Administration issued its infamous blog post by an Assistant Secretary of Treasury announcing the President planned to delay for one year his health care law’s employer mandate.
“To find out who is eligible to buy insurance, and how much subsidy help they get, the exchange will have to consult a data hub.“
"That data hub” – “expected to merge income information from the IRS, disability information from the Social Security Administration, citizenship information from the Homeland Security Department, and income determinations for Medicaid coverage” -- wasn’t even “built yet," and states were “scrambling to update their IT systems in order to talk to the hub."
“If there were ever any question whether the health care law’s data hub would be fully operational on time,” Barrasso concluded of the “Obamacare’s system failure four months ago, “the answer now clearly appears to be “no.”
Considering Tuesday’s major system failure, the answer has been upgraded to a definite “hell no.”
Three years of chronic chaos – coupled with the administration’s constant effort paint Obamacare as a success while simultaneously blaming Congress for any failure -- calls to mind those old Paul Simon lyrics:
I fear I'll do some damage
One fine day
But I would not be convicted
By a jury of my peers
Still crazy after all these years
“When you try to run software that’s incompatible with your hardware,” Human Events staff writer John Hayward, explained on Red State Tuesday, “this is what happens.”
ObamaCare’s failure is spectacular, and not just the coast-to-coast sharknado of error messages, system crashes, pages not found, and unresponsive technical support.
“In the first week, first month, first three months, I would suspect that there will be glitches,” The Washington Times quoted Obama admitting to NPR. “This is 50 states, a lot of people signing up for something. And there are going to be problems.”
"We're going to be speeding things up in the next few hours to handle all of this demand that exceeds anything that we had expected," Obama assured according to CBS..
“The data processing problems will eventually be worked out,” Hayward conceded.
Every computer problem can be solved, if you’re willing to spend enough time and money on the effort.
In the meantime, Hayward also noted that “the commissars of ObamaCare aren’t spending their own money, and they couldn’t care less how long it takes to get things up and running, since they believe they have permanently and irrevocably altered America’s society, economy, and politics.”
Maybe they should have put less money into propaganda slush funds for left-wing special interests, and hired some more IT guys… but they know they have an unlimited line of credit to handle all that infrastructure stuff later.
“In fact,” Hayward predicted, “ObamaCare’s failure will be folded neatly into the relentless demand for more money from the American people.”
Anyone who objects to borrowing more money from China to get the exchanges up and running will be portrayed as a heartless monster who just wants to let poor people die, a careless anarchist who’s ready to throw away all the time and money already poured into ObamaCare.
As The Washington Post reported Tuesday, “lawmakers in both parties predicted that if the shutdown stretches into the weekend, efforts to end it will become part of a larger negotiation over raising the federal debt limit.”
Citing a host of known problems, Scott Gottlieb, Michael Astrue of The Wall Street Journal predicted Tuesday's crash on Monday.
“In planning ObamaCare's IT infrastructure,” they explained, "the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) dawdled for more than a year under Administrator Donald Berwick until Marilyn Tavenner took over in December 2011."
Even then the agency was slow to outsource key contracts and turned to what insiders say were not top-quality programmers. CMS did not sign a contract for a backstop system to process paper verifications and do paper verifications of online applications until July.
Gottlieb and Astrue further noted that HHS “did not begin testing the chief pieces of this IT system until August.
The testing found that states couldn't consistently link to the federal portal (a problem that persists in some states), and that the hub couldn't reliably verify if a person is eligible for a subsidy, or accurately calculate how much the applicant is eligible to receive. HHS prevented independent watchdogs, including its own inspector general, from examining the systems before they go live on Oct. 1. The result is a host of troublesome gaps and dangers.
“The biggest risk, they warned, “involves data security.”
The Obama administration created unnecessary opportunities for fraud with the White House's pork-minded insistence on funding favored community groups to employ "navigators" to solicit applicants and help them input their personal information, such as income and Social Security numbers. The navigators were hastily hired and trained (they are still being hired) and were not given extensive background checks. The personal data for millions of people will be entrusted to these navigators—and to a computerized system that has been rushed into operation.
The August 2013 date on the HSS “Health Insurance Marketplace Navigator Standard Operating Procedures Manual” verifies just how “hastily hired and trained” these “entrusted” navigators really are.
Moreover, that HHS felt the need to advise “navigators” of common sense procedures -- “Do not leave documents that contain PII [Personally Identifiable Information] or tax return information on printers and fax machines” – it knew “the personal data” passing through the hands of navigators who were “not given extensive background checks” would expose “millions of people” to identity theft.
Yep, even after the "2013 Survey on Medical Identity Theft" showed "medical identity theft is quickly becoming a national healthcare issue with life-threatening consequences; and is now the fastest-growing fraud" while "tainting the entire healthcare ecosystem," Obamacare's administrators are proving they are indeed "still crazy after all these years."
There is this one other thing.
On 216 of the manual’s 217 pages, HHS issues this warning:
This information has not been publicly disclosed and may be privileged and confidential. It is for internal government use only and must not be disseminated, distributed, or copied to persons not authorized to receive the information. Unauthorized disclosure may result in prosecution to the full extent of the law.
Considering the number of other people exposing this information – Pat Dollard, The Tea Party, and Americans for Tax Reform, to name a few -- Examiner may have committed a no-no in warning Americans that their government is placing them at risk of having their finances wiped out by some unscrupulous, un-vetted “navigator” who will now be fondling paperwork that has your name, social security number, tax information and home address on it.
But, so be it.
