Just when it seemed that Washington was getting back to “normal,” President Obama’s most cherished accomplishment, The Affordable Health Care Act, exploded on the launch pad.
Love or hate it, in the history of The United States of America, no federal program crashed, burned and bombed as badly as “Obamacare.” From day one, the nearly billion-dollar website — which was outsourced to CGI Group, a Canadian firm — was plagued by chronic system failure.
As reported by the Daily Caller, George Schindler, the president of CGI Federal, CGI’s US division, was an Obama 2012 campaign donor after his company gained the Obamacare website contract. And Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate, Toni Townes-Whitley, is senior vice president at CGI Federal.
Unequivocally, it was political contacts and not professional capabilities that won CGI the no-bid contract to build the Obamacare enrollment website. The facts lie in the numbers. Unable to log on or call in to sign up for a plan, the site managed to enroll a grand total of six Americans on its debut day. Six! This wasn’t anti-Obamacare rhetoric, Tea Party propaganda or conspiracy theory rants. It was a mainstream fact:
Obamacare got six enrollees
on Day 1: report
Six.
That’s how many people signed up for Obamacare on Day 1, according to CBS News, and no, that’s not a misprint.
The Obama administration has kept the number of enrollments close to the vest. It’s touted the number of visitors to the troubled HealthCare.gov website — 4.7 million — but hasn’t released the actual number of enrollments.
But according to CBS News, notes from a “war room” meeting the day after the Affordable Care Act launched on Oct. 1 say “six enrollments have occurred so far.” By the end of Day 2, enrollments totaled 248 nationwide.
The White House predicted 500,000 would sign up by the end of the month, according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press, and that was considered a “modest start” for the market.
CBS notes that in order to meet the goal of 7 million enrollments by March 1, the exchanges need to enroll an average of 39,000 a day.
During Wednesday’s congressional hearing, Health and Human Services head Kathleen Sebelius was asked several times for the number of enrollments. She explained that the data was unreliable and would not be available until mid-November.
“We do not have any reliable data around enrollment, which is why we haven’t given it to date,” she said.
The Obama administration has enlisted the services of computer engineers from tech companies such as Google and Oracle to help fix the troubled health care website, which has been plagued with issues from the start. As Sebelius testified on Wednesday that the site “has never crashed,” users trying to access it found a message that read, “The system is down at the moment.
Yahoo News, 31 October 2013
Though the President ran on a platform of government transparency, the Administration continually refused to tell the public how many people had actually signed up for the plan.
Obama’s promise — “If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what” — turned out to be just another lie.
Yes, a boldface lie, repeated at least 36 times.
