Day: 10/22/2013

FLASHBACK: New Republican Party Site Crashes Hours After Launch

Posted by on October 22, 2013 at 11:17 am. 24 Comments :

For three weeks the Republican Party has been frantically railing about the alleged incompetence of the Obama administration due to the notoriously botched rollout of the website for the Affordable Care Act’s insurance marketplace. Predictable calls for the resignation of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius have come from numerous Republican partisans like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Pat Roberts, Roy Blunt, Ken Cuccinelli, and Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee.

The condemnation from the RNC chief is particularly notable considering their own history of troubled website launches. In October of 2009, The RNC’s GOP.com was to debut with a grand fanfare trumpeting the arrival of the Republican Party into the 21st century with a modern social network that would set the standard for online politicking. It didn’t quite work out that way.

GOP Website Crash
Be Sure To “LIKE” News Corpse On Facebook

When the all new GOP.com premiered it was a train wreck of glitches, bugs, and failure. It crashed entirely within hours of the launch. No one was able to log on. Later it accidentally posted the administrator passwords. A list of GOP accomplishments ended five years earlier in 2004. It falsely listed baseball legend Jackie Robinson as a Republican “hero” (He wrote in his autobiography that “By and large Republicans had ignored blacks and sometimes handpicked a few servile leaders in the black community to be their token ‘niggers.'”). And a “Future Leaders” page was conspicuously (and presciently) blank.

Politico reported that the RNC’s New Media Director, Todd Herman had a familiar excuse, saying that the site was struggling from attracting “an enormous amount of traffic.” And then-RNC chairman Michael Steele laughably responded that “It’s a good thing when you get another email from Todd saying, ‘It’s down again.'”

For the record, CGI Federal, the contractor responsible for the ObamaCare website, is deeply connected to the Republican Party. Buzzfeed reports that…

“[A]ccording to Federal Election Commission records, that company’s PAC gave more to House Republicans than House Democrats during the 2012 cycle — including a $2,000 check for the GOP’s chief scandal investigator, Oversight Committee Chair Darrell Issa. What’s more, executives of CGI Federal personally gave more than twice as much to GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney than to President Obama. The contractor has also feasted on more than $2.4 billion worth of IT work dating back to the early Bush Administration.”

Isn’t that interesting? Especially considering the new and unsupported complaints that the company got the gig due to some sort of sweetheart relationship with the President.

For the Republican Party to take such a strident stand against the President and his team, when they experienced a similarly embarrassing website flop, is hypocrisy on an Olympian scale. The GOP.com website wasn’t nearly the technological challenge that Healthcare.gov is. But Republicans seem to think that an admittedly poor rollout for Democrats is an unforgivable debacle, but for Republicans it’s a “good thing.”

What’s more, the disaster that plagued the GOP was merely a setback for their public relations efforts. At least the Obama administration is attempting to do something that will benefit millions of people, save billions of dollars, and even preserve the lives of Americans who might otherwise suffer due to the greed of unregulated corporations.

Fox Nation vs. Reality: Hundreds Of Thousands Get Better, Cheaper Insurance

Posted by on October 22, 2013 at 9:12 am. 4 Comments :

In keeping with their knee-jerk opposition to everything President Obama does, The liars at Fox Nation posted an item sourced to NBC News with a foreboding headline declaring that “Hundreds of Thousands Lose Their Health Insurance.”

Fox Nation
For more juicy examples of Fox Nation’s lies read Fox Nation vs. Reality.
Available at Amazon.

The first problem with this is that NBC News was not the source of the information Fox was referencing. This misattribution was an attempt by Fox to ding NBC, one of Fox’s favorite punching bags, as well as to pretend that a respected news source was criticizing ObamaCare. The actual source was the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan health policy research and communication organization (not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente).

More to the point, the Fox Nationalists grossly misrepresented the substance of the original article. Contrary to the overtly biased headline, the newsworthiness of the article was not that insurance companies were terminating old, non-ACA compliant plans. It was that the new plans available on the ObamaCare exchanges were both better and cheaper. In fact, the third paragraph down began “By all accounts, the new policies will offer consumers better coverage, in some cases, for comparable cost — especially after the inclusion of federal subsidies for those who qualify.” ThinkProgress did an analysis of the changing plans and found that…

“Many policies currently sold through the individual market do little to help people who actually get sick. These plans come with appealingly low monthly premiums to draw in consumers. But those supposedly ‘affordable’ rates typically mask high deductibles, big gaps in coverage, and large co-pays […] Insurance companies have been able to get away with this because they were largely unregulated before the health reform law’s passage. Now, Obamacare is changing that.”

Fox simply ignored the critical passages in the article to which they linked in favor of advancing their agenda of fear mongering about ObamaCare. They rely on the incurious nature of their audience to fail to read even three paragraphs of the articles they post. It is consistent with their efforts to frighten insurance consumers with poorly researched stories that allege exorbitant price increases, but fail to take into consideration the subsidies and tax credits for which most of the affected people will qualify. So we can chalk this up as just another lie from the folks at Fox Nation.