“There have been some glitches on healthcare.gov and I have to say I’m sorry.” Obama told the crowd of reporters. “I was on the phone with Chancellor Merkel for 3 and half hours Tuesday, so I couldn’t enter any information in the computer, when I tried she kept saying ‘Are you listening to me?!?!.’ Then last night Sasha had a dance recital, we didn’t get home until 11, and I was tired!”
President Obama continued making excuses. “The web site was then probably down on Thursday because we were in the situation room discussing our Afghanistan strategy when John [Kerry] told me to ‘put that computer away, healthcare can wait for right now.'” He said in his best John Kerry impression. “When am I supposed to get this done?” Obama was clearly stressed at press time.
Multiple times during the interview he pulled out his phone and, we can only speculate, began entering more insurance information.
To get the health care law passed then senator Mark Begich (AK) put a provision in the bill, which has yet to be fully read through, stating the president would have to work the website and enroll each individual applicant.
Some speculate this was added to hurt the law when it went into effect 4 years later. In fact it is really keeping president Obama very busy.
Others without healthcare are waiting for the president to “finish with whatever he is doing” and sign them up. Dorris Weatherbottom of Miami, FL is ‘fed up’ that it is taking so long. “If I was president I would have signed me up by now, what is he doing? I heard they make his meals for him. He must have all the time in the world.”
With the current process President Obama prints out the information that was entered on the healthcare.gov. He will then enter the information on paper into the Obamacare database. The obamacare database will then be printed and used when he makes calls to multiple insurance companies to see what their quote will be. After obtaining all of the quotes he will then email the applicant with the results. Finally the applicant will choose a ‘plan’ and the Leader of the free world will call the insurance company back to enroll the applicant. This process can take 1-2 hours per applicant depending on the hold times.
The president’s staff report he has been on the phone for 30 minutes-at-a-time with insurance companies relaying the information that was entered into the web site. The White House does report Obama is using cutting edge technology “Pentium II computer with a dot matrix printer” to help speed up his data entry. There are also takes with AOL-Online to increase the dial-up performance to 9600 bps.
“If there was only a way all these computers could talk.” Obama speculated that “if there was a communication net, internally between parties, well this could go faster. I’ll call my old friend Al Gore and see if he has any ideas.”
