Making A Moose Of A Website

President Obama vowed on Monday to see the problems with the healthcare.gov website fixed as soon as possible.

Obama’s new pitch is the health care law itself is “working just fine.” It just has a balky website that needs to be fixed — and will be fixed, he said. 

“Nobody is madder than me about the fact that the website isn’t working as well as it should, which means it’s going to get fixed,” Obama said. 

Much of Obama’s pitch centered on the guts of the law, rather than its online front door. He said there was no “sugarcoating” the tech problems, but he predicted that people will be patient in order to access health care they wouldn’t otherwise get. 

“The essence of the law, the health insurance that’s available to people is working just fine,” Obama said. “The problem has been that the website that’s supposed to make it easy to apply for insurance hasn’t been working. The website has been too slow, people have been getting stuck during the application process.” 

Obama said he has called for a “tech surge” to get HealthCare.gov running up to speed. He again advertised the government’s toll-free phone number as a way people can sign up while HealthCare.gov does not function as promised.

This is a measured, responsible solution to what have been legitimate problems with the website.

This however is not.

Sarah Palin says the glitches in the online rollout of the Affordable Care Act are a feature, not a bug. 

The former half-term Alaska governor and failed vice presidential candidate suggested Sunday in a Breitbart.com column that design flaws were intentionally implemented to make the system more difficult to use and drive Americans to accept a government fix. 

President Barack Obama admitted Monday that the site needed to be overhauled and announced a “tech surge” to make those repairs, but Palin said the eventual fix would be a Canadian-style socialized health care system.

“These unusable Obamacare websites make a reasonable person wonder how this administration could have made such a colossal bungle of the rollout when they are, after all, the same savvy experts who had the most sophisticated and precise campaign websites ever built,” Palin writes. “They could pinpoint voters down to a city block, but they messed up a website that cost the government over $200 million more than it cost Apple to develop the first iPhone. Purposeful?”

This is why Sarah Palin is not Vice-President, and Barack Obama is President.  As somebody who actually works in IT for a living, I can safely say Sarah Palin knows even less about high-end web solutions that are designed to handle hundreds of thousands of people than she does politics.