During an interview on MSNBC's The Daily Rundown, Rep. James Clyburn (D., S.C.) blamed the recent delays in implementing Obamacare on computer glitches.
PETER ALEXANDER: Congressman, I want to ask you about that issue. There have been some new headlines about it. We now understand the president is delaying another key part of this bill for a year grace period. You just recently said Democrats deliberately structured the bill so that it started kicking in 2014. So what do these delays do for the party in terms of the midterm election? At some point when there's one delay after another, isn't that a significant obstacle?
JAMES CLYBURN: Well, no. I think timing is everything in this business. We set January 1, 2014, deliberately, because we wanted to give people time to prepare for the new law. We didn't want to rush out and pass a law, and then the next morning or the next week, people are trying to comply with it. We wanted to give everybody time to work through all of the issues they need to work through so that we cam get prepared for the law. Now, some glitches have occurred because of redoing computers or reprogramming computers. And so if the president is going to postpone by a year certain aspects of the law, it is not because anything is wrong. It's because we want to get it right. It’s much better for us to postpone things 90 days or 180 days, even a year, and get it right than to get involved in something and find out that these glitches are going to destroy the entire program. I think Gregory Meek had it right this morning when he talked about all of those big issues before. We have to look at big issues in a way that we ought to be able to work through the glitches and get it done right.