Jonah Goldberg explains for National Review Online readers why it’s a stretch to say the troubled Obamacare website is “fixed.”
Success! The Obama administration announced over the weekend that it had hit its deadline of November 30 for HealthCare.gov.
Of course, there were caveats. The site will still probably get buggy when there’s a lot of traffic, which is why Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius advised people to use it at off-peak hours. But that simply means peak hours will be moved to after midnight. After all, you don’t alleviate crowding if you tell everyone to try a different door.
Oh, and there will still be crashes, and occasionally the administrators will have to take the whole thing offline. But, HHS insists, the “user experience” will be boffo for the majority of users.
There’s still one hitch. HealthCare.gov doesn’t work, at all. Sure, it provides a remarkably realistic user experience, but as of now it’s basically a video game. A really, really boring video game. Call it Sim Healthcare.
This is because the so-called back end essentially doesn’t exist. That’s the part of the site that talks to the insurance companies, processes payments, and actually, you know, gets people enrolled on insurance plans.
