Senate liberals blast Medicare boss over ObamaCare

WASHINGTON – The official in charge of the glitch-plagued ObamaCare Web site got taken to the woodshed Monday by some of Senate’s most liberal Democrats.

“There has been a crisis of confidence created in the dysfunctional nature of the website, cancellation of policies and sticker shock for some people,” Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), a die-hard liberal and usually a staunch supporter of President Obama, fumed at Medicare chief Marilyn Tavenner.

Tevenner, on the hot seat in front of the Democratic-led Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, pledged that HealthCare.gov was getting better every day and that the administration would launch a media campaign to entice Americans back to the site.

“I would encourage folks, if they have not gone onto the website in the last few days, to go onto the website,” she said.

She said the site can now process nearly 17,000 registrants per hour, or 5 per second, with “almost no errors.”

Almost on cue, the Web site crashed again for about 90 minutes in middle of the hearing.

Taverner also admitted that the administration didn’t perform a full security check on the Web site before it launched on Oct. 1.

Concerns that peoples’ personal information is at risk on the site is another issue dogging the ObamaCare rollout.

“We couldn’t test live until we went live,” Tavenner said.

Via: New York Post

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WHITE HOUSE SPOKESMAN MELTS DOWN OVER OBAMACARE APPLICATION LIES

Yesterday we learned, thanks to the diligent efforts of House Republican investigators, that the ObamaCare phone lines and paper applications are a huge fraud, just like the rest of the program.  President Obama and his spokespeople were blatantly lying – and they knew it - when they desperately stalled for time by telling enraged survivors of the HealthCare.gov crash to enroll via phone or mail.  That doesn’t work, because the same busted computer system is ultimately required to process the application.  It’s just a waste of the American people’s time – something this Administration holds to be utterly without value, at least when compared to their political viability.

As luck would have it, the intrepid Jonathan Karl of ABC News confronted White House Spokesman Jay Carney – who is, as Karl noted, one of the people who falsely told Americans they could enroll over the phone – with these embarrassing revelations during  Monday afternoon press conference.  Hilarity ensued.

Carney’s “defense” boils down to a modified version of the insult Obama apologists have taken to throwing at the American people, when they claim he merely “mis-spoke” when repeatedly promising that no one would be forced to give up their existing insurance policy under ObamaCare, period.  Carney claimed he said frustrated consumers could “get on the phone and call and the paperwork is filled out of them and the process is taken over from there.”

Via: Human Events

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White House Buys Ad Time To Promote Obamacare Website During NFL Games…

Even though the website doesn’t work.

Via Twitchy:

Via: Weasel Zippers

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Fox's Jim Angle: HealthCare.gov Wouldn't Talk to Me, Knew I Was in the Media

Maybe the folks running the HealthCare.gov call centers don't have an enemies list. Instead, based on the experience of Fox News's Jim Angle, it might be an enemies directory, with anyone they're aware of in the media and perhaps other organizations included therein.

That's what one almost has to think based on the experience Angle recounted on the air and relayed via Twitter Friday (HT Twitchy; individual Angle tweets are here, here, and here):

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The body of Angle's report was also important, because it showed how another aspect of President Obama's core promise to the Americans people — this time, it was "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, period," won't pan out, because Obamacare plans are deliberately keeping the number of doctors in their networks low to try to control costs.

Angle's on-air summary: "So the site seems to be more successful at identifying reporters than explaining the options and signing people up for health insurance."

Based on how Angle relayed the story, it would appear that the only way the helpful HC.gov call center folks could have determined that Angle was a likely media member was by cross-checking his given address against an existing list or directory of media members' home addresses.

If that's the case ... Wow. Talk about paranoia.

If a member of the establishment press had received this kind of creepy treatment at a citizen service line during the Bush 43 administration, I daresay it would have gotten noticed by the likes of the New York Times and the Associated Press.

I don't think that's going to happen this time around.

Here's one reaction to Angle's second tweet:

 They can track you but they can't enroll you now that is weird.

I can think of a few other words more apt to the circumstances than "weird."

Via: Newsbusters

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Consumer Reports: ‘Stay Away From HealthCare.gov’

Consumer Reports, which publishes reviews of consumer products and services,advised its readers to avoid the federal health-care exchange “for at least another month if you can.” “Hopefully that will be long enough for its software vendors to clean up the mess they’ve made,” the magazine said, having tested the site themselves over the course of the past three weeks.

Noting that only 271,000 of the 9.47 million people who tried signing up in the first week managed to create an account, Consumer Reports then provided a few tips to those attempting to slog through the application process. From attempting successive logins because “error messages . . . may not always match reality” to checking one’s inbox frequently because missing an e-mail a user will be timed out of the site and forced to start from square one, none of the suggestions guaranteed success.

The magazine has also released a string of scathing reviews. On October 1, the day the Obamacare exchanges went online, the magazine told people to be patient: “Don’t worry if you can’t sign up today or even within the next couple of weeks.” A week into enrollment, they urged again to “wait a couple weeks and hope that the site irons out its many problems” because the HealthCare.gov is “barely operational.”

Via: NRO

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Analysis: Only 36K Signed Up for Health Care Through Federal Exchange in First Week of Operation

Millward Brown Digital, a consultancy firm, released an analysis today estimating that only 36,000 people had signed up for insurance through the federal Obamacare exchange website.

According to Millward Brown Digital, there were 9.47 million unique visitors to healthcare.gov from the site’s launch on October 1 through October 5. Of those visitors, 1.3 million left the website for their state-run exchange and 3.72 million attempted to create an account on the site. Only 1.01 million successfully did so.

A total of 271,000 people logged into their created account, 27 percent of those who managed to register. The difficulty logging in made the “I’m having trouble logging in to my marketplace account” page one of the most popular on the site with 214,000 people seeking guidance.

Only 196,000 began the enrollment process, which is over 30 steps long. Most didn’t finish it. Altogether, 36,000 people completed enrollment in an insurance plan. That’s a grand total of 1 percent of people who attempted to register on the federal site, and a lower figure than reported by the Daily Mail, which said 51,000 had enrolled during the first week.

The analysis says that “Healthcare.gov was clearly unprepared to handle the huge spike in traffic witnessed on October 1st when it was visited by .9% (or 1 in 114) of everyone online in the U.S. This is roughly equivalent to the daily traffic on Target.com.”

Via: NRO

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