White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was asked to evaluate the performance of Obamacare’s health exchange websites Tuesday, and he responded with a confusing comparison to buying tickets online to a playoff baseball game.
"And it's kind of like people who are trying to get tickets to the first Pirates home playoff game, right? I mean, you know when you go on a site and it's hard to load the page that it's because a lot of people like you want to find out if tickets are available. And the great news about this is it's not one game, it's not one night," Carney responded.
Below is a transcript of the exchange between Major Garrett and Jay Carney:
Q: Give us an evaluation of the first day of the health care exchanges, the consumer experience on the websites. Some have had glitches. Some have been slow, as the president mentioned.
MR. CARNEY: Sure.
Q: Is that entirely a product of over-expected use or are there some internal mechanistic things you have to fix because they're not quite ready?
MR. CARNEY: Well, I'm not an expert on Web design so I can't guarantee that there aren't glitches that are just technical in nature, and I'm sure there are, as we said there would be, as with any large-scale rollout of a policy like this. It was true of Social Security and Medicare, Medicare Part D under the Bush administration. But what is unquestionably the case is that there has been an enormous amount of interest, as we've seen by the number of people who have visited the website.
And it's kind of like people who are trying to get tickets to the first Pirates home playoff game, right? I mean, you know when you go on a site and it's hard to load the page that it's because a lot of people like you want to find out if tickets are available. And the great news about this is it's not one game, it's not one night. The seats are unlimited and the availability will be there for every American family that wants affordable health insurance.
So, you know, we take this, as Bill Clinton used to say, as a high-class problem.