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We haven’t focused on the problems of the healthcare system rollout since any new effort is bound to have shortcomings. Time now though to take a look. The Free Beacon reports on NBC News’ ridicule.

NBC’s Nightly News reported on the disastrous rollout of Obamacare Thursday night, with correspondent Tom Costello calling the website “the focus of ridicule” and quoting experts who could hardly fathom a “worse launch of a nationwide site.”

Anchor Brian Williams introducded the segment by acknowledging Obamacare’s problems would be receiving more media attention if not for the government shutdown.

“If it weren’t for the shutdown dominating the news, we admittedly would be hearing and covering a lot more about how things are going for these new health care exchanges, which were rolled out ten days ago,” Williams said. “Millions of uninsured Americans are being encouraged to go to healthcare.gov to sign up for coverage but it’s been a very rocky start.”

“By most accounts the website has been a complete mess, locking up, crashing and kicking off potential customers,” Costello said. “Of the 260 people who tried to sign up at this Miami clinic in the first week, only a single person got through.” …

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports on the disaster when the Health Sec showed up to tout her program. Steelers chairman Dan Rooney was there to help her. So Steelers fans now you know why your team is 0 -4. Your team’s owner is an old fool.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius had a front-row view of the problems plaguing the website that the government established to allow people to shop for health insurance under Obamacare.

Sebelius and Steelers Chairman Dan Rooney were at an enrollment and education event on Thursday at Heinz Field to promote Healthcare.gov, but people who showed up encountered problems in signing up for coverage on the website.

Unable to handle heavy online traffic and riddled with technical glitches, the website has been a source of criticism of the Obama administration and the new Affordable Care Act since its start on Oct. 1.

Sebelius, who is making similar trips to cities across the country to spread the word about the website, told the audience of about 100 people that Healthcare.gov was “open for business.”

“Believe me, we had some early glitches,” said Sebelius, who was introduced by Rooney, a backer of the law. “But it’s getting better every day.”

At the back of the room, it was a different story. About 20 people armed with laptops and certified by the government to sign up people for coverage were meeting with uninsured people, answering questions and fruitlessly trying to access the website.

LaKesha Lowry, 41, came to the event to find out about her health insurance options. But the North Side resident said she was not able to access the site, even with the help of a certified application counselor. …

 

Andrew McCarthy posts on Wolf Blitzer’s disgust with the roll out.

Andrew presents the clip of Wolf Blitzer bewailing the patent, nigh comical unreadiness of Obamacare implementation (which Charles described earlier — the “wreck” before we even get to the “train wreck“). Rush also played it this afternoon, giving the report legs CNN usually doesn’t have. So now we have Obama’s own media advising that Obama should take the “advice” he’s gotten from Republicans (Wolf couldn’t quite bring himself to utter the words “Ted Cruz,” “Mike Lee,” or “House conservatives”) and delay Obamacare for another year. …

Even the NY Times has figured it out.

In March, Henry Chao, the chief digital architect for the Obama administration’s new online insurance marketplace, told industry executives that he was deeply worried about the Web site’s debut. “Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience,” he told them.

Two weeks after the rollout, few would say his hopes were realized.

For the past 12 days, a system costing more than $400 million and billed as a one-stop click-and-go hub for citizens seeking health insurance has thwarted the efforts of millions to simply log in. The growing national outcry has deeply embarrassed the White House, which has refused to say how many people have enrolled through the federal exchange.

Even some supporters of the Affordable Care Act worry that the flaws in the system, if not quickly fixed, could threaten the fiscal health of the insurance initiative, which depends on throngs of customers to spread the risk and keep prices low.

“These are not glitches,” said an insurance executive who has participated in many conference calls on the federal exchange. Like many people interviewed for this article, the executive spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he did not wish to alienate the federal officials with whom he works. “The extent of the problems is pretty enormous. At the end of our calls, people say, ‘It’s awful, just awful.’ ”  …

Digital Trends posts.

It’s been one full week since the flagship technology portion of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) went live. And since that time, the befuddled beast that is Healthcare.gov has shutdown, crapped out, stalled, and mis-loaded so consistently that its track record for failure is challenged only by Congress.

The site itself, which apparently underwent major code renovations over the weekend, still rejects user logins, fails to load drop-down menus and other crucial components for users that successfully gain entrance, and otherwise prevents uninsured Americans in the 36 states it serves from purchasing healthcare at competitive rates – Healthcare.gov’s primary purpose. The site is so busted that, as of a couple days ago, the number of people that successfully purchased healthcare through it was in the “single digits,” according to the Washington Post. …

… At this point I can only speculate on the total cost to build out Healthcare.gov and the overall technology portion of the FFEs. Based on the available data, however, a conservative estimate puts the cost so far at over $500 million. Considering the GAO estimates it will cost approximately $2 billion to build-out and operate the FFEs in 2014, this is, if anything, likely far too low. …

… Unlike some Americans, I actually want the Obamacare exchanges to succeed. I’ve given the state-specific options a try (there are 15 of them, including WashingtonD.C.’s) and they seem to greatly simplify the process of buying healthcare. And the rates do appear to come in far lower than what many people without health insurance from an employer have had to bear until now. It’s not government-run healthcare. There are no death panels. And, from what I can tell, the world will not end if more people have health insurance – quite the opposite, in fact.

What I cannot stand is a nation that has vast technological resources in its citizenry spending $500 million of our collective money to slap together a product that, thus far, has only managed to waste people’s precious minutes. So the next time our government comes up with any bright idea that relies upon a massive website, let’s all be sure to ask how they plan to build it. Because the standard operating procedure at the moment is just plain sick.

Tom Bevan of Real Clear Politics asks; “Why does Sebelius still have a job?”

Unlike the real world, where managers and employees are judged on results and held accountable for their performance, in Washington, D.C., loyalty and partisanship almost always come first. Accountability comes later, if it comes at all.

This happens in every administration, and President Obama’s is no different, as we’ve seen with the fatal mistakes made regarding the Fast & Furious gun program and in the assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. Democrats, claiming to see these as partisan witch hunts designed to hurt the administration politically, circled the wagons. Obama stood loyally by Eric Holder and Hillary Clinton.

Loyalty is generally a good thing, in politics, as in life. But Kathleen Sebelius and her agency’s rollout of Obamacare is different.

Sebelius’ department had 3½ years to prepare to implement the Affordable Care Act. No one ever suggested that commandeering one-sixth of the American economy would be an easy task. (Many Republicans suggested the opposite and were dismissed as killjoys for their efforts.) But after the debacle of the last two weeks, liberals and Democrats—not conservatives or Republicans—should be calling for Sebelius’s head.

The administration’s handling of the implementation of Obamacare over the past three years has been a slow-moving train wreck: a mixture of embarrassing delays, hard-to-justify waivers, and assorted bad news about the unintended consequences of the law. …

Peggy Noonan says it should be delayed for a year.

The Obama administration has an implementation problem. More than any administration of the modern era they know how to talk but have trouble doing. They give speeches about ObamaCare but when it’s unveiled what the public sees is a Potemkin village designed by the noted architect Rube Goldberg. They speak ringingly about the case for action in Syria but can’t build support in the U.S. foreign-policy community, in Congress, among the public. Recovery summer is always next summer. They have trouble implementing. Which, of course, is the most boring but crucial part of governing. It’s not enough to talk, you must perform.

There is an odd sense with members of this administration that they think words are actions. Maybe that’s why they tweet so much. Maybe they imagine Bashar Assad seeing their tweets and musing: “Ah, Samantha is upset—then I shall change my entire policy, in respect for her emotions!”

That gets us to the real story of last week, this week and the future, the one beyond the shutdown, the one that normal people are both fully aware of and fully understand, and that is the utter and catastrophic debut of ObamaCare. Even for those who expected problems, and that would be everyone who follows government, it has been a shock.

They had 3½ years to set it up! They knew exactly when it would be unveiled, on Oct. 1, 2013. On that date, they knew, millions could be expected to go online to see if they benefit.

What they got was the administration’s version of Project ORCA, the Romney campaign’s computerized voter-turnout system that crashed with such flair on Election Day. …

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Mark Steyn continues with his look at the villainous behavior of the park service.

… Eighty-three percent of the supposedly defunded government is carrying on as usual, impervious to whatever restraints the people’s representatives might wish to impose, and the 800,000 soi-disant “non-essential” workers have been assured that, as soon as the government is once again lawfully funded, they will be paid in full for all the days they’ve had at home.

But the one place where a full-scale shutdown is being enforced is in America’s alleged “National Park Service,” a term of art that covers everything from canyons and glaciers to war memorials and historic taverns. The NPS has spent the last two weeks behaving as the paramilitary wing of the DNC, expending more resources in trying to close down open-air, unfenced areas than it would normally do in keeping them open. It began with the war memorials on the National Mall — that’s to say, stone monuments on pieces of grass under blue sky. It’s the equivalent of my New Hampshire town government shutting down and deciding therefore to ring the Civil War statue on the village common with yellow police tape and barricades.

Still, the NPS could at least argue that these monuments were within their jurisdiction — although they shouldn’t be. Not content with that, the NPS shock troops then moved on to insisting that privately run sites such as the Claude Moore Colonial Farm and privately owned sites such as Mount Vernon were also required to shut. When the Pisgah Inn on the Blue Ridge Parkway declined to comply with the government’s order to close (an entirely illegal order, by the way), the “shut down” Park Service sent armed agents and vehicles to blockade the hotel’s driveway.

Even then, the problem with a lot of America’s scenic wonders is that, although they sit on National Park Service land, they’re visible from some distance. So, in South Dakota, having closed Mount Rushmore the NPS storm troopers additionally attempted to close the view of Mount Rushmore — that’s to say a stretch of the highway, where the shoulder widens and you can pull over and admire the stony visages of America’s presidents. Maybe it’s time to blow up Washington, Jefferson & Co. and replace them with a giant, granite sign rising into the heavens bearing the chiseled inscription “DON’T EVEN THINK OF PARKING DOWN THERE.” …

Jonathan Last with more on the park service’s performance during the shutdown.

… The conduct of the National Park Service over the last week might be the biggest scandal of the Obama administration. This is an expansive claim, of course. Benghazi, Fast and Furious, the IRS, the NSA, the HHS mandate​—​this is an administration that has not lacked for appalling abuses of power. And we still have three years to go.

Even so, consider the actions of the National Park Service since the government shutdown began. People first noticed what the NPS was up to when the World War II Memorial on the National Mall was “closed.” Just to be clear, the memorial is an open plaza. There is nothing to operate. Sometimes there might be a ranger standing around. But he’s not collecting tickets or opening gates. Putting up barricades and posting guards to “close” the World War II Memorial takes more resources and manpower than “keeping it open.”

The closure of the World War II Memorial was just the start of the Park Service’s partisan assault on the citizenry. There’s a cute little historic site just outside of the capital in McLean, Virginia, called the Claude Moore Colonial Farm. They do historical reenactments, and once upon a time the National Park Service helped run the place. But in 1980, the NPS cut the farm out of its budget. A group of private citizens set up an endowment to take care of the farm’s expenses. Ever since, the site has operated independently through a combination of private donations and volunteer workers.

The Park Service told Claude Moore Colonial Farm to shut down.

The farm’s administrators appealed this directive​—​they explained that the Park Service doesn’t actually do anything for the historic site. The folks at the NPS were unmoved. And so, last week, the National Park Service found the scratch to send officers to the park to forcibly remove both volunteer workers and visitors.

Think about that for a minute. The Park Service, which is supposed to serve the public by administering parks, is now in the business of forcing parks they don’t administer to close. As Homer Simpson famously asked, did we lose a war? …

Ed Morrissey says federal workers have become the president’s private army.

The United States established the Civil Service 142 years ago, in response to the massive corruption that followed from the previous “spoils system” in WashingtonDC.  Prior to that, all federal employees served at the pleasure of the President, and jobs got handed out to those who boosted the fortunes of the party in power. 

The result was rampant abuses of power, payoffs and kickbacks, and unaccountable performances at the federal level.  It took nearly 40 years to transform the federal workforce into an independent and professional corps, and almost 70 years before Congress formally forbade civil-service workers from conducting political activities, through the Hatch Act of 1939.

Seventy-four years later, the civil-service system has been exposed as a failure – at least in this administration.  Instead of an independent workforce of professionals who implement federal regulation in an even-handed and competent manner, we have returned to the era of partisan retribution and politically-motivated malevolence.

This goes far beyond the simple incompetence of government eminently displayed by the Department of Health and Human Services in its rollout of the Affordable Care Act exchanges.  Despite having three and a half years between the passage of the ACA and the start date of the exchanges, the federal and state websites launched on October 1st – and promptly crashed.  

Media outlets tried finding someone, anyone, who successfully navigated the system, only to come up with one person who just happened to be a volunteer at Organizing for America – which spent all year promoting Obamacare.  CBS News called this a “unicorn” hunt , while USA Today ripped the Obama administration for the “inexcusable mess” and “nightmare” of the exchanges. …

Michael Ramirez, who we see most often as a cartoonist has more. And the first five cartoons today are his also.  

Word came this week that the National Institutes of Health has suspended therapy-dog visits to sick children at its clinical center because of a 25% reduction in staff, even though volunteers run the program.

Seems the veterinarians who evaluate the dogs have been furloughed. So how about the frequently used dogs that have already been evaluated? No deal.

Last week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid refused to fund NIH clinical trials for children with cancer. When asked why, if it could mean saving a single child, Reid replied: “Why would we do that?”

These are just kids, after all. Who cares if they’re in pain or die because of his intransigence and lack of compassion?

It’s comforting to know, however, that the House and Senate gyms are still open, that the government had enough money to buy a mechanical bull and, while the feds barricaded the open-air National Mall and threatened to fine and arrest those who walk there, they’ll let an immigration amnesty rally take place on those same grounds. …