It is now clear why according to the Obama administration there were no glitches plaguing the Healthcare.gov website administering Obamacare: because a whopping six people managed to sign up on the first day it was launched. By the end of the second day: 248 happy participants in a socialized healthcare ponzi scheme. It is also clear why there was nobody happier than the president when the republican party decided to shut down government on the same day as Obamacare was rolled out: because if public attention had focused on the absolute and now confirmed, disaster that the healthcare law’s rollout had been, then everyone, not just the Tea Party, would be demanding a substantial delay in Obamacare.
The enrollment data comes even after the Obama administration has said it cannot provide enrollment figures from HealthCare.gov because it doesn’t have the numbers. “We do not have any reliable data around enrollment, which is why we haven’t given it to date,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told lawmakers on Wednesday. Turns out she did – as Reuters and ABC report, the documents, which are labeled “war room” notes and appear to be summaries of issues with the problematic website beginning on October 2, indicate a mere six enrollments had occurred by that morning – the day after the website was launched and almost immediately crashed.
So how is Obamacare like Facebook, or any other dot com special du jour – only the pageviews matter. Actual user conversions… well, that’s another matter entirely.
To date, Obama administration officials have refused to publicly provide any estimate of successful enrollments, though they have said the site received 4.7 million unique visitors on its first day and has now generated more than 700,000 applications.
An internal administration memo obtained by The Associated Press and confirmed by ABC News revealed that the administration projected half a million successful sign-ups by Oct. 31.
Good luck with that. And we mean it: after all like any authentic Ponzi scheme, Obamacare works only if wave after wave of signs up “foot” the costs for everyone who doesn’t. As such, unless massive amounts of people enroll, the program is assued to be a failure. Pardon: even more of a failure than it is now.
Naturally, the government was quick to downplay the figures:
HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters stressed tonight that the enrollment figures presented in the “war room notes” are unofficial figures. The agency has said it intends to release its first official report on enrollments by mid-November.
“We will release enrollment statistics on a monthly basis after coordinating information from different sources such as paper, on-line, and call centers, verifying with insurers, and collecting data from states,” she said.
It gets better. Because after finally admitting there is nobody quite capable of messing something, anything, quite like the government, the administration finally agreed to get private sector help. In this case Oracel and… Google – the same firm that it was revealed earlier this week was furious at the government’s spying agency for illegally tapping its confidential user data streams.
The Obama administration said it has brought in experts from top technology companies including Google Inc and Oracle Corp to fix the HealthCare.gov website, as Republicans press for details about the botched October 1 launch.
Health and Human Services said it had added dozens of technology experts and engineers to its round-the-clock effort to fix the technical glitches on the site that is key to the implementation of Obama’s healthcare restructuring law.
Giving some of the first details of who might be leading the tech fix, HHS officials identified two experts by name: Michael Dickerson, a website reliability engineer on leave from Google, and Greg Gershman, a Baltimore-based innovation director with the firm Mobomo and who previously worked for the White House and the General Services Administration.
“We are doing everything we can to assist those contractors to make HealthCare.gov a highly performant, highly reliable, highly secure system,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison told shareholders at the company’s annual meeting on Thursday in Redwood City, California. There was no comment from Google.
No need for a comment: the NSA already knew what they would say.
Finally, get your popcron because Darrell Issa is preparing to make a super spectacle out of the Obamacare flub, after yesterday he subpoenaed Sebelius, who previously took full responsibility for the “debacle”, for more information.
Issa said he had subpoenaed Sebelius for more information on the website’s technical problems, including how it was tested, and enrollment data. The subpoena requires the documents to be produced by November 13.
“The evidence is mounting that the website did not go through proper testing, including critical security testing, and that the administration ignored repeated warnings from contractors about ongoing problems,” Issa said in a statement.
Needless to say, this is all a short-term distraction: sooner or later the website will be fixed. It is only then that all those people who still have no idea what a complete disaster Obamacare is and will be for the US economy, will finally get the long overdue rude awakening.
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via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/uphsIt2YasM/story01.htm Tyler Durden