"Periods of Suboptimal Performance" is the New Subeffective Level

Another thing @benk84 had in the news dump (but sometimes BenK has everything in the news dump), but also worth highlighting.

You will not be surprised to hear that Healthcare.gov will not be fixed by December 1.

You will also not be surprised to hear that the Administration is, get this, spinning failure as success.

CMS spokeswoman Julie Bataille said errors that persist past this weekend would be "intermittent" and, in line with a promise made by the White House, would not affect the vast majority of the site's users.

But Bataille acknowledged that some people would still experience "periods of suboptimal performance" by the system due to either heavy traffic or technical issues that are still being addressed.

"The system will not work perfectly on Dec. 1, but it will work much better than it did in October," Bataille said.

The comments came after the White House said the repair effort is "on track" to meet the Saturday deadline thanks to steady technical improvements.

Spokesman Josh Earnest said the site remains a "work in progress" but touted metrics showing that its error rate and page load times are now far below where they started.

The Administration's spin here is exactly the same as its spin on the economy -- hey, it's awful, but we've made tiny little Green Shoots improvements! It's "poised" to be fixed!

Obama has succeeded, mostly, in changing the bar for success, for his incompetent presidency only, from "actual success" to "tryin' real hard."

And Obama's is tryin' real hard-- to hide the system's inadequacy from the public. He's now putting out the word that people shouldn't come to the system all in a rush (which would overwhelm what little capacity it has) but should come slowly, over a period of days or weeks.

And he's putting out that word quietly, just to his allies, so that they can get the message out to potential users, so that his Administration itself doesn't have to make a public statement that the system will break down if it has more than 17 users logging in at a time (or whatever).

In other words, he's, get this, not being honest and candid with the public about his Administration's performance.

The Obama administration is quietly asking health care advocacy groups not to send a flood of consumers to HealthCare.gov next week, pushing instead for a more phased approach that won't overwhelm the website that the administration has pledged would be fully functional by Dec. 1.

The message is being communicated in private meetings, including one held Monday, a senior administration official told TPM. Groups like Enroll America and Planned Parenthood, which are among the leading organizations that are helping people sign up for coverage under Obamacare, are some of those to be targeted.

"We want to make sure that those who are reaching consumers at scale know that this isn't like you flip the switch and everyone can come back on the first day," the official said.

The plan would serve two purposes. First, it would lighten the load on HealthCare.gov next week, the first after the administration's self-imposed Dec. 1 deadline to get it fully functioning. Limiting the number of people who are coming to the site should help prevent any embarrassing outages. And second, preventing outages would ensure that people who are returning to the site after being frustrated by its early problems will have a better experience.

The plan serves a third purpose: Sparing the Administration from having to tell the American people the truth, and hiding yet another failure from public view.

I guess the leftist propaganda outfit Talking Points Memo forgot to mention that one.

posted by Ace at 01:06 PM

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