[UPDATED BELOW] Highlighting "major problems" with the website of ObamaCare's federal exchange, CNN's Wolf Blitzer said the administration should have accepted the Republican proposal and delayed implementation of the health care law for a year.
"Yeah. If they had three years to get this ready, if they weren't fully ready, they should accept the advice that a lot of Republicans are giving them, delay it another year, get it ready, and make sure it works," Blitzer said on Tuesday. [Video below the break. Audio here.]
Blitzer's candid observation followed Brian Todd's report on "a lot of problems" with the website. Todd quoted a database company owner, "He says it really is just poorly designed. It's just not user friendly. He's still not been able to enroll, much less navigate and get information."
"More than a week after its launch, the federal health care website still plagued by major problems. Long wait time, error messages, crashes, other issues are preventing many people from signing up for insurance," Blitzer introduced the segment.
(H/T Mediaite)
Below is a transcript of the segment, which aired on CNN Newsroom on October 9 at 1:52 p.m. EDT:
BRIAN TODD: A week into it, Wolf, still a lot of glitches. People not able to create accounts just to get information to possibly enroll, much less not being able to enroll actually in the plan. A week in, still a lot of problems. I was just with a database company owner named Luke Chung, he's out of Vienna, Virginia. He has tried to enroll in this since the roll-out on October 1st. He, as a database company owner, he knows this stuff. He says it really is just poorly designed. It's just not user friendly. He's still not been able to enroll, much less navigate and get information. Just when I was with him, he got an error message on his computer saying that he couldn't really go any further. He went into a chat room trying to get information, and was told that there were others kind of in line ahead of him. So even just trying to chat with someone there on the website, people are having problems.
But we're also hearing now, Wolf, is that the administration was warned about these potential problems months in advance. We spoke to Robert Laszewski. He is a health care consultant who has clients who are insurers. He says his insurers who dealt with the administration in the months ahead of time, he says the insurers that he dealt with had contentious meetings with people at HHS and other health care officials who were in charge of this. Contentious meetings in the months beforehand, before this rollout warning them this isn't working. It's not going to be smooth. Don't do it right then. He says those warnings were ignored, they went full speed ahead, and said we'll work these problems out. Now there's been a bit of pushback from the White House. We'll hope to get more later from them. We're running this by them as well.
BLITZER: Yeah. If they had three years to get this ready, if they weren't fully ready, they should accept the advice that a lot of Republicans are giving them, delay it another year, get it ready, and make sure it works. There are other government health care-related websites that work great. They know how to do it. But if they didn't get it ready in time, maybe fix the problem, make sure that people don't have to worry about it.
