Boehner Slams Obamacare Website “Scheduled Maintenance”

by William Teach | October 5, 2013 8:06 am

No website is perfect. Things happen. My host, Dreamhost, has certainly had their share of issues over the years, from minor annoyances to huge outages. Of course, they, like all sorts of giant individual websites, like CNN, Fox News, Youtube, etc, rarely go down, especially for “planned maintenance”. Obamacare?

(The Hill[1]) Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) blasted plans to partially disable ObamaCare’s enrollment site for maintenance during non-peak hours this weekend as a sign of major flaws with the law.

“The news that [the] enrollment system is already going offline confirms that the launch of the president’s healthcare law has been an unmitigated disaster,” Boehner said in a statement Friday.

The comment followed tweets by several Republican leadership staffers mocking the decision from federal health officials and suggesting that it masks serious problems with healthcare.gov.

Boehner also criticized the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for refusing to ay how many people have successfully enrolled in coverage so far.

“This announcement is more proof that we need to delay the law and provide basic fairness, just as Republicans have called for. How can this administration tax individuals for not purchasing a product from a website that doesn’t even work?” Boehner said. Even the Washington Post[2] has noticed that Exchange websites are mostly a disaster, especially Maryland, which was supposed to be a poster child. And

A few state exchanges are performing well. Connecticut officials threw themselves a party after a successful second day. Kentucky officials had a yellow sheet cake with “100,000” in white icing to mark the number of people who had completed the pre-screening process Wednesday.

Let me get this straight: Kentucky was celebrating people completing a process, not people actually signing up for insurance? Personally, I love how healthcare.gov says “Plus, see if you qualify for lower costs.”

They are supposedly going to take it off-line during off-peak hours to add “enhancements”. Because it’s not like they had 3 years and oodles of taxpayer money (wasn’t this supposed to be revenue neutral?) to get it right at launch.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove[3]. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach[4].