“Why is the Administration insisting now on fining people who don’t have insurance – even though people can’t even sign up on the website successfully?”

Click here to watch Sen. Barrasso’s speech.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) spoke about how the Obama Administration’s health care exchange website is a complete disaster that delivers error messages instead of health care coverage.
 
Excerpts of his remarks:

“It was one week ago, that President Obama’s health insurance exchanges opened. By all accounts, it was a complete disaster.

“The Administration had three and a half years to prepare for the big launch.

“It spent months—it spent millions of dollars—advertising the start date.

“And yet, on October first, the American people had their first chance to sign up – and the exchanges flopped. It was a complete fiasco.

“The Administration tried to say that it was caught off guard. They said they were caught off guard by too many people going to the website on the first day.

“Even Saturday Night Live ridiculed the excuse.

“They said, ‘That’s like 1-800-flowers getting caught off guard on Valentine’s Day.’

“There were glitches the first day – but they lasted the whole week—the entire first week.

“Well the question is did the Administration finally get its act together? Well actually, no, it didn’t.

“The past weekend they had to pull down the website to try to fix some of the worst problems.

“You don’t take down the website for minor glitches.

“These are signs of major trouble.

“Some of us have been warning the Administration has failed to prepare properly.

“We said that there would be security holes that would expose people to fraud and identity theft.

“Well it turns out that the Administration didn’t even get to the point where the security flaws would actually matter early on because people couldn’t even start entering their personal information.

“The exchanges were failing to launch. People got repeated error messages.

“They couldn’t fill out forms or applications. They couldn’t create an account to start looking at the most basic of information to even make comparisons.

“When they tried to telephone to get help, they found long wait times and they got disconnected entirely.

“Even the Administration’s biggest cheerleaders admitted defeat.

“One reporter at MSNBC spent so much time trying to show viewers how to sign up for the exchange website online that she actually gave up.

“They were playing this on television—she finally threw in the towel, saying, ‘If I were signing up for myself, this is where my patience would be exhausted.’

“The Wall Street Journal tried to find out what went wrong.

“It talked to computer experts, who looked at the healthcare.gov website.

“And what the computer experts said is, ‘the site appeared to be built on a sloppy software foundation.’

“According to those experts, ‘Such a hastily constructed website may not have been able to withstand the online demand last week.’

“Even the far left Wonkblog at the Washington Post couldn’t believe how badly the Administration had failed.

“One of its columnists wrote that ‘the Obama Administration did itself—and the millions of people who wanted to explore signing up—a terrible disservice by building a Web site that, four days into launch, is still unusable for most Americans.’

“It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

“President Obama promised that using the exchanges, he said, would be like shopping on Amazon.com.

“Well Amazon can handle 13 or 14 million transactions every day with no problem.

“There are over 5,000 websites generating more traffic than healthcare.gov.

“So, how many people were able to successfully enroll in the health care exchanges on the first day?

“We have no idea. The Administration doesn’t want to talk about it.

“First they said they were ‘thrilled’ that so many people were checking out the website.

“By Sunday, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew was on multiple television shows—refused to answer questions about how many people had enrolled, just repeating the White House talking points.

“He claimed that 4.7 million people had visited.

“Well, if they’re willing to tell us how many people had visited the website, why won’t they tell us how many people actually got coverage?

“The Administration won’t provide any data to back up its claims until, they say, at least November.

“You’ve got to remember California claimed five million people visited the website for its own state exchange on the first day.

“It later had to back up and say, nope, we’re sorry, that wasn’t true.  It turns out it only had about 645,000 visitors. Less than a million—not the five million that they claimed.

“That’s a state that spent $313 million on their site, and it couldn’t handle even that many people—because they had trouble.

“President Obama said he was going to have the most transparent administration in history—that’s what he claimed.

“Well, the health care law is this Administration’s signature accomplishment.

“October first was the day that they had been working toward for more than three years—and now the President won’t tell the American people, won’t tell any of us how many people have even signed up for health insurance.

“Why not? What’s the President trying to hide?

“CNN looked into the 24 states that set up their own insurance exchanges under the law.

“They found that, as of last Friday, about 52,000 applications had been started.

“That’s not how many people actually have completed their application successfully—it’s just they’ve started.

“That’s not how many people have actually gotten insurance. That’s just how many people could get to the point of starting their application.

“So even if the Obama Administration fixes the technical problems with its health insurance website, it will not have fixed the many problems with its health care law.

“The law will still not give people the lower cost, high quality care that they wanted—which was the reason we needed health care reform in the first place. 

“But I think the American people will hold the President to his promises and hold the Washington Democrats that voted for this law to their promises.

“The President said just right before the exchanges opened, that coverage in the exchanges should cost less than your cell phone bill.

“He said you should be able to keep your doctor. And he said it should be as easy and secure as Amazon.com.

“So far, the President’s health care law has failed on all of those.

“That was exactly what many of us warned would happen.

“It doesn’t matter if the Obamacare exchange system failures happened because of heavy traffic, or because of design flaws.

“The Administration officials should be embarrassed, but they should not be surprised.

“Republicans warned that the exchanges were not ready for prime time, but the President and Democrats ignored calls for a delay.

“Why is the Administration insisting now on fining people who don’t have insurance – even though people can’t even sign up on the website successfully?

“The President unilaterally gave big businesses a one-year delay in the employer mandate.

“Workers should get the same break that the bosses get. If bosses get a year break and a delay in the penalties, why shouldn’t hardworking men and women all across the country get a delay of a year of the individual mandate?

“President Obama should have delayed the launch of his insurance exchange until it was ready.

“That would have been the fair thing to do. It is still the right thing to do.

“It is also the fair and right thing to do to give individual Americans the same delay of the mandate that the President has unilaterally, without the action of Congress, given to businesses all around this country.”

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