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I noticed the talking point rolled out this weekend was to attempt to claim that Obamacare was somehow a success because "so many" people were getting signed up. It seemed pretty obvious to me that the Democrats were just tossing out numbers and hoping that the American people can't do math.
First number: seventeen million hits on the site. Sounds like a lot, doesn't it? Why, there must be seventeen million people stampeding to healthcare.gov because they SOOOOOOOO want Obamacare. First of all, this completely (and obviously intentionally) ignores all of the people who have tried over and over and can't get on. This was also used as a back-handed way to excuse away the tremendous problems with the site: "well, tut tut, we had over seventeen million people trying to get on; of course it can't handle all of these people who are so desperately waiting for healthcare!" I'm guessing that whoever that was at CNN who has been trying to get on healthcare.gov for days and days probably counts for at least half a million of those hits.
So, a little comparison is in order here to gain some perspective. A reminder that the new NEIP was opened just a few hours after healthacare.gov, so it's as close to a side-by-side comparison as we're likely to find. Anyone on this site can click here and scroll to the bottom of the site and see how many spammers have been stopped from trying to register and then spam NEIP. As of this moment, it's 13,399. While that's not entirely unique IP addresses, it's pretty damned close. On Friday, I went through and collected all of the IP addresses of all of the spammers who have been caught, which at that time was roughly 12,800. I then filtered those through MS Excel so that I had only unique IP addresses. IOW, there were no duplicates after filtering. Of that, I still had well over 12,000 unique addresses of spammers, which I then added to the IP ban list. So little old NEIP, a tooky little message board site of about 20 or so friends chatting with one another had thousands upon thousands of "unique" hits, at the bare minimum. According to the web host, we have had a little over 1.5 million site hits since opening, as of today. So a huge government website that has had three years of buildup and wall-to-wall national television coverage has ... a little more than ten times the number of hits that a tiny little discussion board that virtually no one has ever heard of.
Wowee. The "success" is just overwhelming.
This also, of course, ignores the fact that there are about 172,000,000 households in the United States, totaling somewhere in the vicinity of 308,000,000 people. So even if every single one of those hits was an individual or a household trying to "get healthcare," you're talking about a whopping 1% of U.S. households. What happened to all those vast swaths of the United States without health insurance who were just dying to get onto Obamacare?
Second number: registrations. They really like to say "registration" as if that means someone has gone off and gotten insurance through healthcare.gov. The number cited floated over the weekend, somewhere between 500,000 and just north of 600,000. The problem is that's a bogus number, too. Anyone who wants to shop around for anything at healthcare.gov has to "register" to even look around and then get appalled at how much more their coverage is going to cost now compared to what it used to cost and then wanders away scratching their head, wondering where all of the "affordable" care is, gets promoted by Democrats as being people who now magically can go to the doctor when they couldn't before they found the wonderful Obamacare site.
There apparently was an AP story about this fraud on Sunday, but I never was able to find it to get all of the details, but one thing is pretty clear: only a tiny handful of people in this country have actually signed up for Obamacare. There was the one guy who claimed that he did, but it was a lie. The latest number for those in Alaska who have actually signed up for Obamacare: seven. Someone ask Frosty how many people in Alaska don't have health insurance. Kentucky is being touted as the "rousing success" of Obamacare. To date, somewhere around 11,000 households have actually signed up for Obamacare, but that's out of 640,000 people that the governor of Kentucky claims qualify for Obamacare. And, about a quarter of those signed up in the first 24 hours, so obviously the trend is slowing down, and slowing down fast, as Kentuckians discover that the governor of their commonwealth has spent a huge amount of money (about $1000 per household in recruitment costs alone) trying to get people to sign up for something that obviously doesn't work and most of these people don't like.
And to top it all off, even BSDNC is admitting that this is an unmitigated disaster:
ETA: I forgot to add that, for comparison, google averages a little over five billion searches per day, and when was the last time that google crapped out for weeks on end?
First number: seventeen million hits on the site. Sounds like a lot, doesn't it? Why, there must be seventeen million people stampeding to healthcare.gov because they SOOOOOOOO want Obamacare. First of all, this completely (and obviously intentionally) ignores all of the people who have tried over and over and can't get on. This was also used as a back-handed way to excuse away the tremendous problems with the site: "well, tut tut, we had over seventeen million people trying to get on; of course it can't handle all of these people who are so desperately waiting for healthcare!" I'm guessing that whoever that was at CNN who has been trying to get on healthcare.gov for days and days probably counts for at least half a million of those hits.
So, a little comparison is in order here to gain some perspective. A reminder that the new NEIP was opened just a few hours after healthacare.gov, so it's as close to a side-by-side comparison as we're likely to find. Anyone on this site can click here and scroll to the bottom of the site and see how many spammers have been stopped from trying to register and then spam NEIP. As of this moment, it's 13,399. While that's not entirely unique IP addresses, it's pretty damned close. On Friday, I went through and collected all of the IP addresses of all of the spammers who have been caught, which at that time was roughly 12,800. I then filtered those through MS Excel so that I had only unique IP addresses. IOW, there were no duplicates after filtering. Of that, I still had well over 12,000 unique addresses of spammers, which I then added to the IP ban list. So little old NEIP, a tooky little message board site of about 20 or so friends chatting with one another had thousands upon thousands of "unique" hits, at the bare minimum. According to the web host, we have had a little over 1.5 million site hits since opening, as of today. So a huge government website that has had three years of buildup and wall-to-wall national television coverage has ... a little more than ten times the number of hits that a tiny little discussion board that virtually no one has ever heard of.
Wowee. The "success" is just overwhelming.
This also, of course, ignores the fact that there are about 172,000,000 households in the United States, totaling somewhere in the vicinity of 308,000,000 people. So even if every single one of those hits was an individual or a household trying to "get healthcare," you're talking about a whopping 1% of U.S. households. What happened to all those vast swaths of the United States without health insurance who were just dying to get onto Obamacare?
Second number: registrations. They really like to say "registration" as if that means someone has gone off and gotten insurance through healthcare.gov. The number cited floated over the weekend, somewhere between 500,000 and just north of 600,000. The problem is that's a bogus number, too. Anyone who wants to shop around for anything at healthcare.gov has to "register" to even look around and then get appalled at how much more their coverage is going to cost now compared to what it used to cost and then wanders away scratching their head, wondering where all of the "affordable" care is, gets promoted by Democrats as being people who now magically can go to the doctor when they couldn't before they found the wonderful Obamacare site.
There apparently was an AP story about this fraud on Sunday, but I never was able to find it to get all of the details, but one thing is pretty clear: only a tiny handful of people in this country have actually signed up for Obamacare. There was the one guy who claimed that he did, but it was a lie. The latest number for those in Alaska who have actually signed up for Obamacare: seven. Someone ask Frosty how many people in Alaska don't have health insurance. Kentucky is being touted as the "rousing success" of Obamacare. To date, somewhere around 11,000 households have actually signed up for Obamacare, but that's out of 640,000 people that the governor of Kentucky claims qualify for Obamacare. And, about a quarter of those signed up in the first 24 hours, so obviously the trend is slowing down, and slowing down fast, as Kentuckians discover that the governor of their commonwealth has spent a huge amount of money (about $1000 per household in recruitment costs alone) trying to get people to sign up for something that obviously doesn't work and most of these people don't like.
And to top it all off, even BSDNC is admitting that this is an unmitigated disaster:
ETA: I forgot to add that, for comparison, google averages a little over five billion searches per day, and when was the last time that google crapped out for weeks on end?
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