by: Allen Domelle
I sat in my room on October 20 watching President Obama address the problems that the government website for the Affordable Health Care Act was having. As I listened, I was embarrassed to watch the President of the United States acting more like a salesperson trying to convince people that this is a good product instead of acting presidential. Giving out a 1-800 phone number for people to call if the website was not working and hearing him tell of two incidents where the Health Care Act helped lower someone’s insurance rate was nothing short of a salesperson selling his product.
There is no doubt that the Affordable Health Care Act is the pride and joy of this president, but to defend what has been going on since October 1 when the government website opened is shameful. The opening of the website has been nothing short of disastrous. He talked of the government as if it was a business. If the government were a business, then it would have gone under a long time ago.
What troubles me about this Affordable Health Care Act is how unaffordable it has become. According to usaspending.gov, the government spent a whopping $634,320,919 to build the healthcare exchange website that has been disastrous. Yes, you are seeing the number right, over $634 million to build a website. This caused me to immediately do some research to see the affordability of the healthcare website and its programs. Being that I have my own website, I thought this was an astronomical amount of money to spend on building a website. If you were to take 50 website developers and pay them $100 dollars an hour for 8 hours a day, and they worked for 365 days, you would spend $14,600,000 to build a state of the art website. The government could have hired 63 web developers for 40 years and paid them a salary of $250,000 a year for the $634 millions spent. Yet, the government spent $634 million to build a website that does not work.
I called some website developer friends to ask them if they could build the website for less than $634 million dollars, and in each case they said it would be far less to build a site than this. So, I did some research and found that the Four Seasons Hotel recently spent $18 million dollars to build a brand new website, and it works. Amazing!
In an attempt to defend the errors in the website, the president said that they’ve had several million people visit the site and fill out applications for health insurance. He even defended it by saying that Apple had a glitch in their recent release of their IOS 7 platform.
Again, I did some more research to see how many downloads Apple had to accommodate compared to the government website, and I found a large disparity. According to several sources, there are over 600 million IOS devices in the world, and to date over 438 million have downloaded the IOS 7 platform that is of far greater in download size than the information the government website collects. Again, Apple’s downloads had no glitch. Their site did not crash.
The President said in his speech that in spite of the problems with the government website, that there was “massive interest in the product.” According to healthcare.gov, there have been about 500,000 applications taken for healthcare. Of course, they have not disclosed how many of these applications have been approved. Yes, they have to approve these applications in spite of what the President has been saying. When you compare the 500,000 applications to the almost 314 million people in the United States, that means less than 1% of Americans have even applied. I would not call this “massive interest.”
Let’s look at this even further. According to healthcare.gov, they had 19 million unique visitors visit the website. That sounds like a lot, but when you understand what a unique visitor is, you will understand that 19 million people have not visited the site. I could visit the site in the room where I am writing this article, then go down the street and find a hotspot in a coffee shop to visit the site, and both visits would be a unique visit. As we know, people have been trying to get on this site multiple times which should tell us that there are far less than 19 million people truly looking into the site. When you compare the governments’ traffic to Apple, you would realize that the government only had 4% of the traffic compared to what Apple had, and the Apple website did not crash.
Friend, someone is going to have to pay for this. I am not talking about people in the government losing their jobs, I am talking about the $634 million bill that it took to build the site that could have easily been built for $500 million dollars less. This is gross negligence by the president and his staff at the least.
Luke 14:28-29 says, “For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it? Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him,” This debacle of the government website has again given the United States a black eye in the world community. If this had happened in any other realm of business other than government, everyone involved would have lost their jobs.
It is time Christians wake up and stop giving this gross waste of the people’s money a pass. Instead of criticizing Senator Ted Cruz for standing up for the American people in his 30 hour filibuster, you should be thanking God that there is someone who has the courage to stand against government waste. Yes, it is a Christian matter when it comes to spending money, even for a government. It is time to take notice, see who is pushing this mess, and make them pay in the next elections. If the healthcare website is a debacle, then what does that say about the Health Care Act itself?
Allen Domelle is the editor of the Old Paths Journal which is more than just a Christian’s publication. It is an excellent place to learn how today’s headlines will forge tomorrow’s laws and statutes. Keep yourself in tune with what is happening around the world, as well as in your own backyard with our daily updates and devotionals.