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CNN Tries and Fails to Sign Up for Obamacare

'This isn't like the iPhone'

CNN's Brooke Baldwin and CNN Senior Medical Correspondent Elizabeth Cohen discussed the latter's difficult experience trying to sign up for insurance on various Obamacare exchanges Tuesday afternoon, The Weekly Standard reports.

Cohen noted glitches prevented the CNN team from signing up for insurance on over half of the state exchanges used in their sample exercise:

BROOKE BALDWIN: So you guys hit a wall. we're here in Georgia. What about other states? Similar issues?

ELIZABETH COHEN: The CNN medical team branched out. We tried in about 20 different state states. In 12 of them we hit glitches. Sometimes it made it impossible to sign up. There were error messages or that little annoying kind of twirly thing.

BALDWIN: I hate the twirly thing.

COHEN: Hate it, hate it, right? In many cases, you just couldn't sign up.

BALDWIN: President Obama, he addressed this, speaking at the White House earlier, sort of likening it to glitches with Apple. This was the president:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Like every new law, every new product rollout, there are going to be some glitches in the signup process along the way that we will fix. I've been saying this from the start. For example, we found out that there have been times this morning where the site's been running more slowly than it normally will. The reason is because more than 1 million people visited healthcare.gov before 7:00 in the morning.

BALDWIN: He had said, you know, issues with iPhone when it first rolled out, you know, but this isn't necessarily like the iPhone, right?

COHEN: Right. My iOS 7 works. I just sent someone an email, it works. This I couldn't even sign up. In some states we tried, we couldn't get to the signup point. In many cases, we hit a wall. They say they're trying to speed it up.

CNN's experience closely mirrors MSNBC's own anticlimactic attempts to sign up for insurance on the new exchanges:

Published under: CNN , Obamacare