A Morning Joe panel roundly condemned the rollout of the Affordable Care Act federal exchanges Monday morning, calling the malfunctioning websites “outrageous” and “unacceptable,” and accusing the website developer of incompetence and Health and Human Services of deliberately misleading the public.
“The roll-out is unacceptable,” regular guest Mark Halperin said. “The secrecy is unacceptable. It begins with not saying how many people have enrolled. I don’t understand why they can’t release that figure on a rolling basis. But in addition, you search in vain for answers to lots of questions. Tom Costello, lots of other reporters have asked them every day for basic information. When governments are in crisis, they withhold information, and sometimes they don’t tell the truth.”
“I’m not being ideological,” co-host Joe Scarborough said. “These people want to run our health care system, and they want to be the grand organizers of what’s most important to most Americans over the age of thirty-five or forty. And yet they’re not telling us what’s going wrong with our system that theywant to run?”
Mike Barnicle went one further. “They’re lying about it now,” he said. “They’re not depriving us of information, they are outright lying…about the numbers of who have enrolled, the numbers who have made the process complete, the numbers of people who have actually signed up, a couple others things. The larger point is they keep using the word, ‘unacceptable.’ This is not unacceptable, this is outrageous.”
“Up until recently, they didn’t realize how bad this was going to go out,” Huffington Post’s Sam Steinsaid. “No one beta tested the site, which is almost criminal, when you think about it. The president was caught off-guard, which is really unfortunate and also really kind of messed up. So you need someone who brings accountability to the process; I wouldn’t be surprised if a few people lost their jobs. But this starts with basically explaining to Congress and to the American public what went wrong. I think that’s a very low bar for the administration to hit.”
Watch the full segment below, via MSNBC:
