This is a question that was begging to be asked of a sort of web visionary in the digital age, and Willie Geist asked it: Is this heaping criticism on healthcare.gov warranted?
The Morning Joe co-host reported Wednesday that he had spoken to ‘one of the co-founders of a very, very major social media site’, and asked him whether or not the media was missing something in its harsh treatment of the Obamacare rollout on the web. The source was definite in his response.
“He said, no, they had two-and-a-half years to figure this out; to build a site that would work, and as you said, there were going to be problems in the beginning, but you have things in place to fix that,” Geist said. “And he said, frankly, the government’s technology sucks.”
Geist said that his source’s social mediate platform was one “you all know and may have open on your computers,” narrowing the possibilities. Without speculating too much, suffice it to say that it probably wasn’t Myspace Tom.
Samuel Broder, former director of the National Cancer Institute, has an interesting quotation that dovetails nicely with the healthcare.gov fiasco and the observations of a modern digital guru about a government website.
“If it was up to the NIH to cure polio through a centrally directed program … you’d have the best iron lung in the world, but not a polio vaccine,” Broder once said.
Watch the video of Geist’s comments, via NewsBusters, below.
