Obamacare’s Harshest Critics? Look at What These Liberals Are Saying
Crystal Goodremote /
KEVIN DIETSCH/UPI/Newscom
Each passing day brings to light new problems with HealthCare.gov – and with it some surprising comments from President Obama’s friends. Liberals are turning out to be some of Obamacare’s harshest critics – from pundits on television to lawmakers in the halls of Congress.
Here are some of the highlights:
Senator Mark Pryor (D-AR) on his plan to delay the individual mandate:
Affordable health care was never meant to be — if you’ve got insurance, now you’re going to have to buy insurance that’s more costly and not as good. That has to be fixed.
David Axelrod, a former White House adviser and strategist on Obama’s reelection campaign, said on MSNBC’s “The Last Word”:
They need to be forthcoming with the public and report on a regular basis as to the progress that’s being made … This has been shrouded in a little bit of mystery. I don’t quite understand why that is … I also would be very, very tough on the people who are responsible to get those fixes done quickly … I’d be, as I’m sure they are, kicking a bunch of folks in the butt every day to make sure that what need to be done is being done.
Joe Scarborough, co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” said:
These people want to run our health care system, and they want to be the grand organizers of what’s most important to most Americans over the age of 35 or 40. And yet they’re not telling us what’s going wrong with our system that they want to run?
Ezra Klein, blogger and columnist for The Washington Post, said the website’s problems aren’t simply glitches:
One of the Obama administration’s jobs, separate from all of the political stuff we talk about here, is to simply run things like this well, to run their signature legislative initiative well. … On that, so far, this has been a big failure.
Clay Johnson, who worked for Obama’s digital team in 2008, said:
HealthCare.gov got this way not because of incompetence or sloppiness of an individual vendor, but because of a deeply engrained and malignant cancer that’s eating away at the federal government’s ability to provide effective online services
Sam Stein, political reporter for the Huffington Post, appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” said:
No one beta tested the site, which is almost criminal, when you think about it. The president was caught off-guard, which is really unfortunate and also really kind of messed up.
Arthur Delaney, a Huffington Post reporter, hoped the problems with HealthCare.gov were a joke:
I keep expecting Obama to look at the camera and yell LIVE FROM NEW YORK IT’S SATURDAY NIGHT!
— Arthur Delaney (@ArthurDelaneyHP) October 21, 2013
It’s no joke.
Mike Barnicle, an MSNBC contributor, said:
They’re lying about it now. … They’re not depriving us of information, they are outright lying…about the numbers of who have enrolled, the numbers who have made the process complete, the numbers of people who have actually signed up, a couple others things. The larger point is they keep using the word, ‘unacceptable.’ This is not unacceptable, this is outrageous.
Mark Halperin, TIME’s editor-at-large and senior political analyst, said:
The secrecy is unacceptable. It begins with not saying how many people have enrolled. I don’t understand why they can’t release that figure on a rolling basis. But in addition, you search in vain for answers to lots of questions. Tom Costello, lots of other reporters have asked them every day for basic information. When governments are in crisis, they withhold information, and sometimes they don’t tell the truth.
And when one liberal challenged another, he told us what we already know: Obamacare will be a complete disaster for liberalism.
@joanwalsh The ACA is the most important liberal project in decades. If it fails, it is a complete disaster for liberalism.
— Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) October 16, 2013