I can only imagine the feeling, Sir.
I've never been a big fan of Gibbs, but on this note he's
spot on:
"Can you imagine if we weren't obsessed with the shutdown what would be going on on health care?" Gibbs, now an MSNBC analyst, said. "In fact, Republicans probably would be a lot closer to their goal had they not done that."
"This is excruciatingly embarrassing for the White House and for the Department of Health and Human Services. This was bungled badly," he continued. "This was not a server problem, just too many people came to the website. This is a website architecture problem. I think it's excruciatingly embarrassing. It's not fatal because there are still many weeks and days to go before the enrollment period closes at the end of March."
This was the main reason I was saying a few months ago the president had better things to do than attend to Syria's internal problems. Like rolling out his signature accomplishment.
So far, we know millions of people have visited the healthcare.gov. The administration says it needs 7 million people to enroll in the first year for the program to work. Well, we don't know how far along we are to achieve that goal, but if the difficulties of using the site are any indication, its probably not very far.
Furthermore, I have no idea why all they rolled out was a website (1990's!) rather than an app. I mean if the goal is getting healthy youngsters in first, you go with the app, not a website. Kids these days are nuts for new apps. Hell, there should be a full-on suite of tools to use. They've had three years to get ready for this. And a few million people on a website, really, isn't that much of a tech challenge anymore.
Heads need to roll and someone serious needs to be brought in to fix this shit. Especially before we get into the meat of campaign season next year. How about the Obama Campaign tech team? No way they'd tolerate a fuck up like this.