After a bruising week of public relations blunders, the Obama Administration announced that its all but inoperable Obamacare website would be temporarily offline for weekend repairs.
President Barack Obama claimed that the website failures were the result of massive traffic that “exceeds anything that we had expected” and said the website’s collapse “gives you a sense of how important this is to millions of Americans across the country, and that’s a good thing.”
Experts, however, told the Washington Post that the Obamacare “site is badly coded.” So bad, in fact, that web designers on social media site Reddit have started a thread mocking strands of the Obamacare website’s coding. “They’re loading 11 CSS files and 62 (wat?) JavaScript files on eachpage, uncompressed and without expires headers,” wrote one Reddit user. “Theyhave blocks of HTML inexplicably wrapped in script tags. Wtf?”
As progressive Washington Post writer Ezra Klein noted, “As of Thursday morning, health-care reporters were desperately trying to find one” person who successfully signed up through the Obamacare website. No sooner had journalists thought they had found one Obamacare enrollee than did it turn out to be a hoax by an Organizing for Action (OFA) volunteer who later told the Washington Post he did not, in fact, sign up for Obamacare but intends to.
Still, the White House has maintained that the Obamacare website has ground to a halt because it has been hit by a tsunami of Internet traffic. Yet according to web analytics giant Alexa, as of this writing, the Obamacare website (healthcare.gov) is ranked only the 506th most trafficked website in America. By comparison, Breitbart.com is presently the 239th most trafficked website in America.
On Friday, Speaker John Boehner blasted the Obama Administration for the website’s failed debut.
“The news that its enrollment system is already going offline confirms that the launch of the president’s health care law has been an unmitigated disaster,” said Boehner. “How can this administration tax individuals for not purchasing a product from a website that doesn’t even work?”
Health and Human Service (HHS) promised that by Monday, “there will be significant improvements in the online consumer experience.” Whether the government’s website repairs will quell citizens’ sticker shock over Obamacare premiums remains to be seen. The government’s official Obamacare Facebook page has been deluged with outraged citizens expressing surprise and dismay over high Obamacare premium quotes and endless website failures.
The Obama Administration spent $229.7 million in taxpayer money to build the federal exchange websites.
The first ten years of Obamacare implementation will cost taxpayers an estimated $2.6 trillion.
According to a CNN poll, just 39% of Americans support Obamacare.