Health Care

You never get a second chance to make a first impression. However, PBS’s Judy Woodruff wishes the Obama administration could get another crack at the rollout of ObamaCare. While moderating an ObamaCare discussion on Tuesday’s PBS NewsHour, Woodruff posed this question to Ron Bonjean, a former Republican spokesman: [Video below. MP3 audio here.]

On Tuesday's MSNBC Daily Rundown, host Chuck Todd was eager to declare the ObamaCare disaster to be over and claim Republicans were now of the defensive: "With 750,000 visitors to the site yesterday without a crash and the Obama administration now confident that the website is functioning...the Republican repeal movement may actually now fizzle out completely." [Listen to the audio or watch the…

On November 19, Henry Chao, deputy chief information officer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told a congressional committee that "[W]e still have to build the payment systems to make payments to issuers in January" for those who have enrolled in plans through HealthCare.gov. On Black Friday, while almost no one was paying attention, Alex Nussbaum at Bloomberg News reported…

Call it a case of interview envy--in the context of an ongoing feud between two MSNBC hosts. There has been bad blood between Joe Scarborough and Chris Matthews for years, as here, here and here.  On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough took the occasion of Chris Matthews' impending interview of President Obama to mock the way Matthews' on-air schedule has shrunk. In a particularly low blow,…

How does one do a report on an important commerce-related web site without mentioning serious known security problems which are so bad that respected IT experts warn that it shouldn't be used? Ask Kate Pickert at Time's Swampland blog and Kelli Kennedy at the Associated Press, because that's exactly what they did. Pickert and Kennedy reviewed the new and not much improved HealthCare.gov on…

As my colleague Jeff Meyer noted earlier this afternoon, msnbc.com has been busy today boosting HealthCare.gov, insisting that the "bug" which made the website nearly inoperable in October and November was now fixed and everything was working just fine. Well now the landing page for the Lean Forward network is hailing HealthCare.gov as the "website [which] might just save your life." The…

Anyone doubting Roger Ailes' eye for talent needs to go somewhere else besides his shuffling of Fox News's weekday evening lineup, especially but not exclusively his decision to move Megyn Kelly into the 9 p.m. time slot. Variety's Brian Steinberg reports that Kelly has put even more distance between Fox and its so-called competitors at CNN, MSNBC, and HLN, while Greta Van Susteren and Sean…

Talk about burying the lede. Deep within a 5,000-word story published today in the New York Times about the Obamacare website launch is the very damaging disclosure that the much-vaunted “tech surge” promised by the president in late October was mostly just a publicity stunt. In truth, the number of people brought in to work on the project was no more than “about a half-dozen.” Not only that…

Monday's CBS Evening News and Tuesday's CBS This Morning both underlined the continuing problems with HealthCare.gov, even after the Obama administration claimed "it met its deadline to make HealthCare.gov work smoothly for the vast majority of shoppers". Meanwhile, the network's competitors at NBC hyped the supposed positive news about the ObamaCare website. Wyatt Andrews noted how the…

MSNBC weekend anchor Alex Witt once again showed that she is a big fan of ObamaCare on Sunday’s edition of her eponymous program. Witt’s guest, Dafna Linzer of msnbc.com, had just criticized one of Rep. Mike Rogers’ (R-Mich.) comments on that morning’s Meet the Press, in which Rogers was critical of ObamaCare. Witt recalled another problem with the rollout that Rogers talked about in that…

Obama sycophant and Hardball host Chris Matthews just landed what MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell called a “big get” interview this Thursday with the president. So naturally he took to the air on Tuesday's Andrea Mitchell Reports to gush about the chief executive who's been known to send tingles up his leg. Matthews compared President Obama to a “brilliant writer…with a great theme” who “turns in a…

Leading off a report on Monday's NBC Today, White House correspondent Peter Alexander skeptically observed: "The Obama administration says it met it's own goal of significantly improving the HealthCare.gov website, but that's the easy part. That's like kind of giving yourself a passing grade." At the end of segment, he noted insurance companies warning of the "logistical nightmare" caused by…

The folks at MSNBC.com seem to be dutifully following their on-air counterparts in providing cover for the failed rollout of the HealthCare.gov website, even as sister network CNBC is reporting ongoing problems with the site. In a December 2 online piece, Sarah Muller, Senior Digital Producer for The Last Word w/ Lawrence O’Donnell, wrote a gushing pro-ObamaCare piece exulting that “Major…

How hopeful is CNN's Chris Cuomo about ObamaCare? He would still rather defend the law's problems, if he were a Democrat, than pivot to the debt ceiling as a distraction. "The Democrats going on a three-week campaign tour for Obamacare instead of just dealing with the hard legislative work they need to do down there right now? I'll take that trade," Cuomo asserted on Tuesday's New Day. "[I]f…