Flashback: HHS Ad Touts Obamacare's Exchanges As On Schedule
In June, the Government Accountability Office issued a report warning that Obamacare's exchange implementation process had already missed numerous deadlines. If delays continued, the federal watchdog warned, the law's exchanges might not be ready on time. The report prompted increased concern about whether or not the Obama administration could have the exchanges functional by October 1.
A month later, the Department of Health and Human Services released the following video attempting to allay such concerns:
The video ends with an assurance that the the health exchanges would be open and ready for enrollment on October 1.
We now know that this was sheer bluster: What little testing there was on the site didn't even begin until just before launch, and some of it failed. At no point was there ever a successful end-to-end test of the complete user experience on the federal exchanges. And the demo version shown to White House officials in July, the same month this video was released, was a mock-up with no functioning back-end.
Either HHS was mistaken to the point of incompetence in its confidence, or the agency was intentionally misleading people.
