Jeff Zients, Leading the Healthcare.gov Rescue Effort, Says... Well, He Seems to Signal It's Not Going to be Fixed on Deadline

I don't even know what to call December 1st. We're calling it a "deadline," but we already had the deadline. The deadline was October 1st. This new "deadline," two months after the actual deadline, is... what? What do you call it?

Anyway, nothing but problems.

The Obama administration's HealthCare.gov adviser Jeffrey Zeints said on Friday that the trouble-plagued federal healthcare website is improving, but that higher volumes of visitors are exposing new capacity and software issues.

In a conference call with reporters, Zeints said progress this week has been marred by roadblocks. He described HealthCare.gov as being "a long way from where it needs to be."

Perhaps they've finally learned to underpromise and overdeliver, and are just trying to set up some drama about whether they will get it done on time (except it's not on time, it's two months late). By playing this expectations game -- setting the table for failure in advance -- they can then look like Big Damn Heroes if they make the deadline (which they can't, because it already passed, and it was October 1).

Or perhaps they're just going to keep on failing, forever.

The website debacle -- which is actually saving Obama's ass right now, by disguising all the other more fundamental and less fixable problems with Obamacare -- has a special importance, because Senate Democrats have agreed to not call for fixes (such as actually honoring Obama's promises), but only until the deadline for fixing the website (which is actually two months after the actual deadline).

ertain Democratic senators, very much aware of the impact that ObamaCare’s ongoing problems and glitches could very well have on their reelection prospects in next year’s midterms, are willing to give the White House some time to iron everything out and get the website finally running at least somewhat smoothly before they start piling on with their own accusations, criticisms, and fixes — but not much.

They have campaign schedules to keep, after all, and if ObamaCare isn’t working like a charm by early 2014, the situation could eventually mean some Senate Democrats are going to have to look out for themselves, even if it’s at ObamaCare’s expense.

As I write this, FoxNews is running tape of Mary Landrieu babbling about the grandfather clause not being written "as strongly as it should have been" and promising to file some sort of fix for that.

posted by Ace at 02:35 PM

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