CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: I thought one of the most telling elements of all of this was the government's own report on the website improvement which it said that the website is now going to begin operating at a private sector velocity, which was unbelievable in its irony. Here is an official government document, which is openly admitting that the private sector is infinitely superior to the public sector in doing stuff and it does this in a document which is trying to reassure us about an enterprise, Obamacare, which in fact is a de-privatization, a nationalization of the entire universe of American medicine, one-sixth of the economy. It makes you wonder if these guys even read their own stuff.
The problem here is, number one, the capacity is quite low. 50,000 is a very small number. Amazon handles over a million an hour. And here if you go to 50,000, you end up like Peter Doocy where you have to wait five hours until you get in a queue, a lovely British word, meaning in an endless wait until the website is ready for you.
Second is security. All the experts who were before Congress a couple of weeks ago have said it is utterly insecure and they wouldn't use it in the absence of security. All kinds of information is now vulnerable. And the third is what you mentioned, the backend. Which means all these people are shoving information into a system which is either reaching the insurers incorrectly, in which case there are going to be huge complications. It could take eons to actually undo the bad information or is not reaching the insurers at all. In which case somebody will show up January the 1st thinking he has insurance who doesn't and we're going to have all hell break loose.
