The mainstream media is taking the news that the ACA website is fixed very badly today, but few are taking it worse than biased ABC News. ABC is refusing to admit that the site is fixed.
ABC News used the headline “White House Declares Obamacare Website Fixed, But Problems Persist,” which basically accused the White House of lying about the status of the ACA website.
The problem is that ABC’s own story contradicts their biased headline.
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The story states that,
Two months after the troubled launch of its signature health care initiative, the Obama administration on Sunday announced that its online insurance marketplace now functions smoothly for the “vast majority” of consumers seeking to shop for and enroll in coverage.
“We’ve doubled the system’s capacity and HealthCare.gov can now support its intended volume,” said Jeff Zients, the administration official overseeing repairs to the system, on a conference call with reporters today.
The website can handle 50,000 concurrent users and 800,000 users per day, Zients said, marking a significant improvement from October when it crashed under the weight of just several thousand visitors. The site’s response time and error rate for applicants have also vastly improved, he said.
ABC based their headline on the fact that the website has a downtime rate of 5%. Most website owners will tell you that they want 100% uptime, but that is unrealistic. Every website is going to fail or go down at some point, so the most realistic expectation is for 99%+ uptime. The ACA website is at 95%, which is a gigantic improvement from the 40% uptime rate when the site launched.
ABC News needed something to keep the broken website story alive with, so they decided that reducing a 60% downtime rate to 5% was a total disaster that meant that the White House was not telling the truth about the health of the healthcare website.
Whether ABC News all of the other corporate media outlets want to face it or not, the ACA website is vastly improved and working for people who want to sign up for access to affordable healthcare.
The media refused to embrace reality, chose to listen to the Republican Party’s delusional fantasies about the ACA website being broken forever, and now they are paying the price.
ABC News is still pushing debunked Republican talking points about the website. This is another example of why ABC News has no credibility, and why the corporate media can’t be trusted.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
