A Democratic congresswoman said Tuesday that the bumpy rollout for the Affordable Care Act should not cost anyone their job.
One day after former White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said that the people should be fired over the glitches that have typified the launch of HealthCare.gov, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) said she disagrees.
“Absolutely not. First of all, when we see the numbers that turned out to sign up on the exchanges, we’re very, very pleased. And, yes, because so many people, millions, you know, wanted to enroll, wanted to get more information, it certainly did cause some glitches in the system,” Waters said during an appearance on MSNBC. “Everybody knows that when you’re talking about the new technology, you’re going to have some glitches. You have something that you have to work out. And so we believe certainly that it will be worked out.”
President Barack Obama’s top technology guru backed off that assessment, saying earlier this month that the bugs were a byproduct of web traffic that was higher than anticipated.
Waters suggested that the glitches are no reason to be alarmed and that opponents to Obamacare are eager to draw attention to any of the law’s warts.
“This is not about firing somebody. If you work in a big complex, a big office in government, you will find that there are times when the system will go down, when there are glitches in the system. It happens,” she said. “And so they’re just using this oftentimes as a way by which to say, ‘Aha! I told you so. This is not going to work.’ But we don’t buy that. We’re going to continue on the road that we are on. We’re going to get those exchanges up.”
