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 Wednesday.
[Video below. 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:
[1:52]
WOLF
BLITZER: 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. Brian Todd has been taking a closer look at this part of the
story. What are we seeing right now, well into a week into this new
program?
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.
