We Knew It Was Bad; We Just Didn't Know How Bad

Imagine if there was a 10% chance that the Apple computer you ordered on-line was shipped to the wrong address.

Imagine if 10% of your Amazon orders never arrived.

Imagine if 10 out of 100 google searches crashed your computer.

My hunch: you would quit buying Apple products on-line; you would avoid Amazon; and you would use Yahoo search. Although with all I order from Amazon, I probably wouldn't even notice if 10% of my ordered products didn't arrive. Especially if Amazon broke up the bulk deliveries to individual packages. But I digress.

But that's the official error rate for the Obamacare website -- the entry portal to ObamaCare, the portal that does not yet let you pay for your product.

Ten percent.

"We believe nine of 10 transactions are being successfully transmitted," the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, spokeswoman Julie Bataille said at a news briefing.

And this is not some Fox News celebrity reporting this: it's highly-respected Bloomberg quoting highly-respected Julie Bataille of the highly-respected Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

As opposed to Ms Sebelius.

But you now what's really scary? It's that THEY DON'T KNOW.

They "believe" -- sort of like religion -- they "believe" that nine of ten transactions are being successfully transmitted.

And then think about this: I would assume any good marketer would "lie" just a little bit, exaggerating just a little bit that things were actually better than they were. That's why the "10%" is probably not quite accurate. It's probably the best-case scenario.

Can you imagine Apple's Ted Cook: "We believe nine of ten transactions are being successfully transmitted. You might want to try H-P or Dell where they are getting close to 99% success."

Can you imagine Amazon's Jeff Bezos: "We believe nine of ten packages are being successfully delivered, but if the FAA approves our drones, we think we can get that to nine-point-five."

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That's the good news. Here's the bad news. All those enrollments in October and November. Twenty-five percent (25%) will end up being tossed, will be do-overs. The problem: who knows which ones are in the 25% error box -- yours, mine, your friends, relatives?

This is worse than we were let on to believe. I think most folks just thought there were problems accessing the site. Now we find out that even if thought you had enrolled, there's one chance out of four your form is in the ether somewhere, or attached to someone else's form, or sent to who knows where.

The Washington Examiner is reporting:

After refusing for weeks to detail the extent of back-end problems with healthcare.gov, the Obama administration on Friday said a technical bug affected approximately 25 percent of enrollments on the federal exchanges in October and November.

Those technical bugs, separate from the troubles consumers had experienced accessing information on the website during the first two months, are posing a significant new problem for those who signed up and are expecting insurance coverage come Jan. 1.

One in four of those applications either did not get transferred to insurers, were transferred in duplicate form, or had major errors in information shared.

 It is amazing the chief architect of this debacle still heads HHS.

By the way, note the time that article was published: 4:48 pm so that it would conveniently missed the Friday evening news. Don't fret. Most people now watch Fox for news and they will talk about this all weekend.