Framing the Dialogue

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius stormed the Burgh yesterday to plug the Affordable Care Act snarkily referred to as Obamacare. With a big ASSist by Pittsburgh Steeler owner Dan Rooney. Rooney has not been shy about prostituting his football team to ASSist Obama in all things liberal. It did pay off as Rooney is coming off of his Obama-sponsored stint as Ambassador to Ireland. This latest gig has raised the ire of many conservatives as he used the publically-funded Heinz Field for the show. I don’t get the dismay or surprise. This Rooney and his Steeler empire have been feeding off of the public trough for a long time. They are a privately owned company until they need a new field, additions to the field, more seats in the field, the property around the field to name a few.

So this magnificent event was to showcase Obamacare and in particular the nearly $500 million dollar website. While that number seems high…okay absurdly high we do need to consider that it took three years to perfect. Here are a few phrases from an article in our local paper;

“Sebelius, who is making similar trips to cities across the country to spread the word about the website, told the audience of about 100 people that Healthcare.gov was “open for business.”

“Believe me, we had some early glitches,” said Sebelius, who was introduced by Rooney, a backer of the law. “But it’s getting better every day.”

“At the back of the room, it was a different story. About 20 people armed with laptops and certified by the government to sign up people for coverage were meeting with uninsured people, answering questions and fruitlessly trying to access the website.”

“In recent days, technical glitches with the site’s design have prevented people from creating accounts and accessing the shopping function. “

“HHS officials so far have declined to release enrollment numbers for the federal website, saying they plan to provide monthly updates. It was unclear how many people — if any — were able to enroll at Thursday’s event.”

A few things here…

• They spent nearly $500,000,000.00 of our earnings to build this websit
• They took three years to build this website
• They spent nearly $500,000,000.00 of our earnings to build this website
• It doesn’t work
• They spent nearly $500,000,000.00 of our earnings to build this website
• It doesn’t even work on the preplanned event scheduled to showcase the website
• They spent nearly $500,000,000.00 of our earnings to build this website
• They aren’t even smart enough to make the damn website work for a PR event
• They spent nearly $500,000,000.00 of our earnings to build this website
• This would be funny if it wasn’t costing us soo much money.

“We, the taxpayers, seem to have forked up more than $500 million of the federal purse to build the digital equivalent of a rock.”