Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D., Mont.) pressed Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius over healthcare.gov’s continued problems during Wednesday’s committee hearing, asking:
Why keep limping along? Why not just shut it down until it is put together the way it should be put together?
Baucus, one of the main authors of the Affordable Care Act, famously said in April of this year that he saw "a train wreck coming down the road" when Obamacare was implemented. He continued to question Sebelius over not shutting down the site until it was fully fixed, citing the bad press that Obamacare’s rocky rollout has thus far received:
Every day there is a story that someone did not get on, blank page, security problems, that is a bad media campaign. It is negative, does not hurt you, it -- it does not help you, it hurts you. Why not have it shut down and just have one bad story and then for as long as it takes, a couple of weeks, go back and get that gateway up and running? ... One more time, why not just get it done right?