You know things are going badly when you’re a Democratic President whose former press secretary turned MSNBC contributor is on national television bashing the rollout of your signature piece of legislation.
On Monday, Robert Gibbs, appearing on MSNBC’s Now, said of the ObamaCare website, “I hope they fire some people that were in charge of making sure that this thing was supposed to work” (video follows with transcript and commentary):
ROBERT GIBBS, MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR, FORMER OBAMA PRESS SECRETARY: This is excruciatingly embarrassing for the White House and for the Department of Health and Human Services. This was bungled badly. This was not a server problem, right? Like just too many people came to the website. This is a website architecture problem. I think it is, again, 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.
I give credit to Al Hunt in his column today. I thought he had an interesting statistic. The Massachusetts healthcare rollout, people came on average 18 times to the marketplace website before they signed up for insurance. This is not iTunes. I hear a great album, I'm going to go buy it, boom, I buy it, and it's a one-time easy transaction. This is healthcare, and it’s very, it's very involved. People are going to take their time with it.
But, boy, if they don't get these glitches figured out fast, people aren't going to come back for visits 15 through 18. And I will say this: I hope they are working day and night to get this done, and when they get it fixed, I hope they fire some people that were in charge of making sure that this thing was supposed to work. We knew there were going to be some glitches, right? But these are glitches that go, quite frankly, way beyond the pale of what should be expected.
Wow! How hard do you think it was for Gibbs to say that, ESPECIALLY on MSNBC?
