In October, when the Affordable Care Act’s website Healthcare.gov repeatedly crashed, we were told by the Obama administration that it was due to a high volume of Americans simultaneously trying to sign up for health insurance.
Turns out that the website was never prepared to handle more than 1,100 users a day, according to the House Oversight and Reform Committee documents released yesterday. This is a huge deviation compared to the 60,000 simultaneous users that United States CTO Todd Park claimed it could process back on October 6.
The myriad problems associated with Obamacare prompted HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to admit that the entire healthcare rollout has been a “miserably frustrating experience.” Back on the hot seat yesterday in front of yet another congressional hearing on the flawed Obamacare fiasco, Sebelius admitted that a report on initial enrollment figures due out next week will show “very low” numbers.
While Sebelius was being grilled by congress, President Obama admitted in a speech in Dallas, Texas he was very unhappy with the early roll out of Obamacare. “As challenging as this may seem sometimes, as frustrating as healthcare.gov may be sometimes, we are going to get this done,” he said. Obama continued by drawing an analogy: “This is like having a really good product in a store, and the cash registers don’t work, and there aren’t enough parking spots.”
Because Texas refused to set up state exchanges, citizens have to rely on the federal exchange, which, has been riddled with problems. Texas Governor Rick Perry, rejecting an Obama assertion that the Affordable Care Act is greatly needed in Texas, remarked that Obama is trying to “salvage his ill-conceived and unpopular program from a Titanic fate.” Perry insists that Texans are not the reason for failings of the new law, “Obamacare is the reason Obamacare is crumbling.”