Liberal pundit Bill Press might want to call ahead to the Hill’s editors the next time he sends them a column. If he had done so, it might have saved him from embarrassing himself in his latest column.
On page 17 of Tuesday’s edition, Press writes the following regarding the Obamacare roll-out:
“So many people, an estimated 8 million, tried to visit the site in the first two days, that the system crashed. There’s no excuse for that, but it does show how much pent-up demand there is among working Americans for basic healthcare for themselves and their families.”
That has been a popular argument for liberals: Obamacare’s troubles are just a matter of so many people rushing to get it. That isn’t true, however; the Obamacare website crashed for a different reason.
As a headline on the Hill’s front page in the same edition states: “ObamaCare site’s collapse is seen as structural, not just heavy traffic.”
The online version of the story is titled simply “ObamaCare crash not just traffic.” The article begins:
Further down in the story, it cites technical experts who describe a “long list of other flaws” in the site’s construction and coding. A software engineer named James Turner told the Hill: “It’s probably the most broken release — as opposed to a beta site — that I have ever seen.”
Ouch.
