Tuesday's Top Editorial Pages Blast ObamaCare Incompetence

If only these papers had held Obama accountable a year ago we wouldn't be in this mess!

The Wall Street Journal titled it's editorial "1-800-ObamaCare-Denial" and points out that "building the website was supposed to be the easy part. The health law's fiasco of a debut doesn't inspire confidence in those other ambitions, such as re-engineering how U.S. medicine is provided." The Journal adds that Obama used his Monday Rose Garden appearance as an "infomercial" in which Obama failed to:

explain[] what went wrong, and why, and where the buck stops, or if there is even a provisional timetable for when the exchanges will function properly. Instead he minimized the severity of the problems, perhaps for political reasons. Or maybe he didn't say because the defects are so deep that no one can identify the specific solutions.

By the way, we called the hotline on Monday and the automated menu redirected us to Healthcare.gov, which in turn told us to get in touch with someone at the call center.

The Journal summed up with this:

[T]he exchanges fiasco is revealing the larger truth that ObamaCare's claim to technocratic expertise was always a political con. It won over the New Yorker and made ObamaCare designer Peter Orszag a celebrity. But it was all a veneer for ObamaCare's real goal, which is to centralize political control over health care.

That false front is clear now as we are told to ignore the faulty rollout because it will get fixed, eventually, and in any case the law is really about reducing inequality. At least now Democrats are being honest. The actual results will always matter less to liberals than their good intentions and expanding the reach of government.

The Washington Post editorial said that " the computer snafu was self-inflicted incompetence." They added:

Mr. Obama said Monday that “the number of people who’ve visited the site has been overwhelming,” with about 20 million site visits to date. Why is that so overwhelming? Commercial computer systems such as Google and Facebook manage to handle billions of visitors every month. The U.S. government runs supercomputers for national defense applications that are among the highest-performing in the world. Mr. Obama’s administration seems to have behaved as if this project were not a priority.
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But he must also pay more attention to credibility and transparency. Why has Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius declined to testify this week before a House committee? She ought to meet critics head-on, instead of claiming a scheduling conflict. And officials refuse to say how many people have enrolled in the health-care plans through the federal portal. Why the secrecy? The administration is not going to restore confidence through secrecy and damage control.

USA Today asks: "President vows action, but where has he been?" They point to the near panic in the Obama Administration and say:

[Y]ou can't help but wonder: Where was all this frantic effort in the three-and-a-half years from the time Obama signed the health law to the day the exchanges opened on Oct. 1? Because that might have helped avoid the unforced error that is raising doubts about the administration's ability to manage other pieces of the complex law.

USA also blasted the Obama Administration's lack of transparency:

[T]he administration remains mostly clammed up. It won't say how many people have enrolled. It won't fully detail the problems. And it hasn't identified key subcontractors who botched the $400 million start-up, or the team brought in for repairs.

Any undertaking this complex was sure to have problems — and not just at the cash registers. But the administration is making a big mistake if it thinks it can stonewall its way through them. Far better to expose the weaknesses — and move quickly to fix them. A stream of surprises like the website mess will leave its credibility in tatters.he administration remains mostly clammed up. It won't say how many people have enrolled. It won't fully detail the problems. And it hasn't identified key subcontractors who botched the $400 million start-up, or the team brought in for repairs.

Any undertaking this complex was sure to have problems — and not just at the cash registers. But the administration is making a big mistake if it thinks it can stonewall its way through them. Far better to expose the weaknesses — and move quickly to fix them. A stream of surprises like the website mess will leave its credibility in tatters.

The New York Times raised similar concerns:

The administration created the Web site so the buck necessarily stops with high officials — Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, and President Obama himself — who allowed this to happen. The administration attributes the problems partly to unexpectedly high demand from people eager to compare insurance policies available in their states and partly to technical glitches that blocked or slowed people from submitting applications and erroneous data being sent to insurers. Why the administration failed to anticipate the high demand has never been explained. Nor has it clearly explained the nature of the technical problems — or who in government or among the private contractors is primarily responsible for them.

For some comic relief, let's go to Comedy Central's Jon Stewart's commentary on the Daily Show:



Jay Leno chimed in too: Leno: ‘Easier to Join Al Qaeda Using Their Website Than it is to Sign Up for ObamaCare.’ More here.

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2013/10/23/leno-easier-join-al-qaeda-using-their-website-it-sign-obamacare#ixzz2iZYARO1W
If Barack Hussein Obama, who some on the left declared was the "smartest man ever" to sit in the Oval Office can't manage a web site, and refuses to be be held accountable or offer full transparency of what went wrong and why, it justifies Americans concerns about his takeover of health care. Don't say we didn't warn you!