How ironic—and appropriate—in the Internet age that the fate of President Obama’s second term in the eyes of many observers hinges on the performance of some techie programmers in a back room trying to get the healthcare.gov website to act right.
In the end, it may not be the Benghazi attack, Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks, Syria’s chemical weapons or the government shutdown. It might be a seemingly simple portal that acts as the entry point for most Americans who want to sign up for health insurance through Obamacare. The horrific functioning of the website might just give the Republican opposition enough ammunition to permanently wound the president. The GOP shut down the entire federal government to stop Obamacare, not realizing that the mechanism to destroy the president might have been right in front of them all along.
At least that’s the premise being explored among political commentators and pundits on the right and the left.
On CNN’s State of the Union yesterday, conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat jousted with other commentators when he pronounced that the fate of the president was linked to whether young people sign up for healthcare—which he said won’t happen if the site is broken.
“The entire presidency is riding on [Obama’s] ability to do that,” Douthat said.
“This is a problem with this story,” Democratic strategist Cornell Belcher said. “You go back to a couple years under Bush, and you heard Speaker Boehner talking about horrendous rollout of a program, and he was talking about prescription drugs. These don’t necessarily rollout well. But this is a process sorry. You’re missing the forest for the trees. It’s not about a process. It’s about a value.”
“The policy is the process in this case,” Douthat said. “The design of this system is built around getting a certain number of people to use the website and sign up.”
“Ross is right,” The Hill’s A.D. Stoddard said. “It’s a fundamental, structural issue. They needed a great start. You could have had glitches later. You needed to get people pouring into the system, because the sick are pouring into the exchanges; for the first time they can get covered when they couldn’t before. Now you need young, healthy people to balance out the risks and to actually keep it affordable. Without those … consumers, it’s not affordable anyway.”
“We’ve seen this before,” Belcher said. “We saw it in Massachusetts where the bulk of the people signed up for it, they signed up towards the end.”
“One, it wasn’t as polarizing an issue,” Douthat said. “And you weren’t trying to sign up people on a national scale.”
Because of the website problems, the Obama administration is now in the position that any tech company would dread – having every problem or glitch with the site become a news story.
All of us have had the experience of trying to log onto our favorite sites and every once in a while being surprised that the site is down or performing strangely. In these cases, most of us just keep it moving until the problem is resolved. But when that happens now to healthcare.gov, it becomes front-page news.
For instance, the story that a malfunction on the site yesterday left users unable to apply for coverage was big news on every major site on the web, putting a spotlight on the programmers and information technology folks behind the whole operation.
Joanne Peters, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, blamed the malfunction on a vendor networking issue at Verizon subsidiary Terremark. Peters said the vendor had “experienced a failure in a networking component,” and the attempted fix crashed the system.
Peters added that HHS chief Kathleen Sebelius had discussed the problem with Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam.
In response, Verizon spokesman Jeff Nelson said his company was working on the issue and it would be “fixed as quickly as possible.”
Many Republicans have been calling for Sebelius to be fired because of the website problems. They will get their chance to gouge her during congressional hearings on the website problems in the coming weeks.
Obama said in a speech last week that tech teams were “working out the kinks in the system” and the repairs would be overseen by former White House budget official Jeffrey Zients—who claimed the site would be working for the”vast majority” of users by next month.
