While many liberals are busy explaining away the disastrous launch of Obamacare’s online exchanges, these men of the left are big enough to admit all has not gone well.
1.) The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein
The liberal pundit is a big Obamacare booster, but he concedes that the program’s launch has been something less than triumphant.
“So far, the Affordable Care Act’s launch has been a failure,” Klein wrote in a Monday post entitled, “Five Thoughts on the Obamacare disaster.” “Not ‘troubled.’ Not ‘glitchy.’ A failure. But ‘so far’ only encompasses 14 days. The hard question is whether the launch will still be floundering on day 30, and on day 45.”
“A lot of liberals will be angry over this post,” he continued toward the end of his article. “A lot of conservatives will be happy about it. But it’s important to see the Affordable Care Act as something more than a pawn in the political wars: It’s a real law that real people are desperately, nervously, urgently trying to access. And so far, the Obama administration has failed them.”
“The Obama administration’s top job isn’t beating the Republicans,” he added. “It’s running the government well. On this — the most important initiative they’ve launched — they’ve run the government badly. They deserve all the criticism they’re getting and more.”
2.) Comedian Jon Stewart
The liberal host of “The Daily Show” isn’t exactly an Obamacare fan — it appears he would prefer a single-payer system. Nonetheless, he conducted a brutal interview of Health and Human Services Director Kathleen Sebelius last week, in which he mocked the launch of Obamacare’s online exchanges for being an unmitigated disaster.
“We’re going to do a challenge. I’m going to try and download every movie ever made and you are going to try to sign up for Obamacare — and we’ll see which happens first,” Stewart joked after opening a laptop computer.
During the interview, Stewart also questioned the fairness of delaying the employer mandate while not doing the same for the individual mandate, and accused Sebelius 0f lying to him. That’s probably not the type of interview the secretary expected when she signed on to do the show.
3.) Former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs
Even Robert Gibbs, who was once one of President Obama’s closest aides, is shocked by the incompetence of Obamacare’s implementation.
“This is excruciatingly embarrassing for the White House and for the Department of Health and Human Services,” Gibbs said Monday on MSNBC, where he is now a contributor. “This was bungled badly. This was not a server problem, just too many people came to the website. This is a website architecture problem.”
“I hope they’re working day and night to get this done,” he added. “And when they get it fixed, I hope they fire some people who were in charge of making sure this thing was supposed to work. We knew there were going to be some glitches. But these are glitches that go, quite frankly, way beyond the pale of what should be expected.”