It's been almost a month since the Health Care Exchange opened, and it's still extremely difficult to create an account. Although the primary issue on October 1st seemed to be a glitch with some drop-down menus, that technical difficulty has been smoothed over. It's the very next part -- the actual ability to hit "send' and have the server process the newly created account -- that seems to be a problem now.
Americans are born and bred to becomes competitive line waiters -- tweens whose parents let them wait outside the Today Show for 19 hours to glimpse a teen idol probably become the crazed adults who camp outside the AT&T store every time a new iPhone is released. But Marco Rubio is questioning our dedication and patience as a people by boldly claiming that we'd rather incur a government fine than deal with an overburdened server. Now he's drafting a bill that would extend the deadline for obtaining insurance until the site works better. He says the bill, which would move the deadline to six months after the kinks were worked out, could be introduced as early as Monday.
The Tea Party senator has been vehemently opposed to health care reform in the past, making various bold claims this year about its potential cost and efficacy that the Miami Herald deemed mostly false. But his latest attempt to derail the legislation is based on simple fairness, he claims.
"How you can punish people for not buying something that is impossible to buy because of the inability of this website to function because of government incompetence?" he asked Fox News anchor Bill O'Reilly last night.
Right now, Americans have until March 2014 to get signed up with a plan. The entire transcript from the Rubio interview went up as a press release on his website this morning.
Florida has been one of the least friendly states to the Affordable Care Act. Last month, the Department of Health said that federally funded Navigators -- those tasked with helping Americans understand and sign up for health insurance under the new law -- weren't allowed to step foot in county offices.
Other states have been more jazzed about the potential for health care reform and have marketplaces that straight-up speak our language. Yesterday, Colorado was treated to a hilarious ad about "Brosurance" that aim to galvanize its uninsured residents with a pretty apt analogy. The crux of the ad: You already know that keg stands are crazy, but so is going uninsured! True, Colorado, true.
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