Here’s the funny thing about sweeping things under the rug: the rug doesn’t actually, like, eat them or anything. They’re still there. Or, if this Daily Mail article is correct*, they’re not there:
Just 51,000 people completed Obamacare applications during the first week the Healthcare.gov website was online, according to two sources inside the Department of Health and Human Services who gave MailOnline an exclusive look at the earliest enrollment numbers.
The career civil servants, who process data inside the agency, confirmed independently that just 6,200 Americans applied for health insurance through the problem-plagued website on October 1, the day it first opened to the public.
Regardless about how you feel about government shutdown drama (I take a detached view, not to mention full advantage of my avowed self-designation as a partisan hack), all of this stuff is merely delayed, not gone. The people who are aggravated at their rates going up by ten grand a year are still going to be aggravated about that next November, and it won’t really matter whether John Boehner or Ted Cruz or the freaking Easter Bunny acted optimally or not.
Moe Lane
PS: Back in 2009-2010 I got told upstairs and downstairs and in my lady’s chambers that the media would keep our victories to a minimum. In fact, I’m always being told that the media/GOP/sunspot activity would doom the Right utterly. It’s background noise for me at this point – and, yeah, that includes the people who were correct at one particular point. Everybody remembers their wins; nobody remembers their losses.
*If.
That is a close approximation of the CNN estimate of 52,000. If what the insurance companies are reporting is correct, that only 1 per 100 of the applications that come thru contain enough uncorrupted data to complete the insurance for. Than we are going to be looking forward to a very big problem come January. Have I mentioned before it’s going to be a long hard winter? I’m having to trim fruit trees to get all the fruit, not an optimal situation. Anybody got a good pear cider recipe handy? How’s about pear sauce? Just gave a bucket full away to the inlaws and they live on a farm. When Townies are giving food away to farmers something is seriously fragged up.
P.S. They didn’t need it but making sure you have good intrafamily relations is an end in itself. Never pass up a chance to help out your neighbor, you can never tell when you might need your neighbors help. And establishing a good faith credit account outside your neighborhood or with your neighbors never hurts. In short, people to people relations are important we forget that. Personal note: I have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome had it pointed out to me today that the average life expectancy is 48 I’m 56, I guess I’m doing something right. Take it for what it’s worth. I credit my wife. Need to buy her something nice this Christmas.
Gee, if we can keep this blistering pace up until the end of the year, we will enroll almost 634,000 people at the cost of $1,000 each in computer fees.
http://nation.foxnews.com/2013/10/09/report-us-taxpayers-shelled-out-634320919-obamacare-website
… the fact that Healthcare.gov can’t do the one job it was built to do isn’t the most infuriating part of this debacle – it’s that we, the taxpayers, seem to have forked up more than $634 million of the federal purse to build the digital equivalent of a rock.