U.S President Obama just conducted a speech in Washington D.C. regarding “Obamacare” that referenced Apple Inc.
There have been reports of widespread glitches today as the massive federal program launched. A message on the federal web site, Healthcare.gov, which is the main enrollment site for 34 states, said that it was having technical difficulties because so many people are logging on.
“Technical glitches held up a number of people, including West Virginia resident Jon Tucci, who supports President Obama and the health-care law and wanted to enroll on insurance marketplace at the first moment possible,” Sandhya Somashekhar and Susan Svrluga report for The Washington Post. “‘I’m pretty fluent on the Internet,’ said Tucci, 60, who is self-employed in the oil and gas industry. ‘I’ve applied for a lot of things, and there are always glitches. But this was totally disappointing. I’m just really frustrated.'”
“On Monday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius pleaded for patience during a briefing with reporters, acknowledging there would probably be some site issues in the coming days and weeks as the administration moves forward on the sweeping program known as Obamacare. She likened the inevitable fixes to software updates on Apple products such as the iPhone or iPad,” Somashekhar and Susan Svrluga report. “‘No one is calling on Apple to not sell devices for a year or to get out of the business because the whole thing is a failure,’ she said. ‘Everyone just assumes there’s a problem, they’ll fix it, let’s move on… Hopefully, they’ll give us the same slack as they give Apple.'”
Obama’s statement, from just minutes ago, in part:
For every news product rollout there are gonna be some glitches along the way that we are going to fix. I’ve been saying this from the start. For example, we found out that there have been times this morning where the site’s been running more slowly than it normally will. The reason is because more than 1 million people visited healthcare.gov before 7 in the morning…
We’re gonna be speeding things up over the next few hours to handle all this demand that’s exceeding anything that we expected.
Consider that, just a few weeks ago, Apple rolled out a new operating system and within days they found a glitch, so they fixed it. I don’t remember anybody suggesting Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads or threatening to shut down the company if they didn’t. That’s not how we do things in America.