Will Obamacare ever work as advertised? If human nature is any guide, it will not and cannot. But, one could argue, we don’t know until we try. (Twelve doctors in Congress dispute that.) Well, we have tried the web site. The federal Obamacare exchange depends on that web site. The government had more than three and a half years to build it, if one counts from the day (March 23, 2010) de facto President Obama signed Obamacare into law. Now judge the result.

The Obamacare web site: a colossal foul-up

True stories of people trying to use the Obamacare web site now abound. But one story deserves special mention. A particular actress named Deborah Lielasus boasted, in a thirty-second TV spot, that the site couldn’t be any easier to use. Just reading the description on YouTube is enough to give you a sugar high.

Deborah visited the Health Insurance Marketplace at HealthCare.gov to get covered. She will save hundreds of dollars each month. Now she has better coverage, lower deductibles, and lower co-pays.

You can be covered too! Visit HealthCare.gov to learn more and apply: http://hlthc.re/18lSfYX Or call 1-800-318-2596 to apply by phone 24/7.

Connect with us on Twitter or Facebook and tell us why you want to #GetCovered: https://www.healthcare.gov/connect/

Not so fast! Sterling Beard at National Review Online caught up with Ms. Lielasus. She told him the rest of what happened. She found the site, all right. But the site stopped working after she created an account. She worked at enrolling for three days before she could enroll.

James Taranto covers this and other stories of people whose glowing testimonials were in fact less than honest. He also gives this lead to the first cracks in the mainstream media’s defenses of Obama and Obamacare. Chuck Todd of NBC News – NBC News! – asked this of White House Press Secretary Jay Carney:

Five days before the launch, the president said it’s a website where you can compare and purchase affordable health care plans the same way you shop for a plane ticket on Kayak,” Todd recalled. “Who misled him? Who misled the president on this?

Who misled whom?

The Star of Life, featuring the Rod of Asclepius, the true symbol of medicine. Photo: US Department of Transportation

Maybe no one did. Maybe Obama knew the Obamacare web site would never work on time, but launched anyway.

John Hayward at Human Events gives a bellyful. He got the scoop from The Washington Post. That’s right: The Washington Post, where the doyenne of liberal editors-in-chief, Katherine Graham, once reigned supreme. What she would think of this piece, none can guess.

Days before the launch of President Obama’s online health ­insurance marketplace, government officials and contractors tested a key part of the Web site to see whether it could handle tens of thousands of consumers at the same time. It crashed after a simulation in which just a few hundred people tried to log on simultaneously.

Despite the failed test, federal health officials plowed ahead.

What. Did. They. Say?

No wonder that site behaved like the target of a Distributed Denial of Service attack! And they knew it all the time, but launched anyway.

This site is so bad that Consumer’s Union, publishers of Consumer Reports, tells people not to bother with the Obamacare web site for at least another month. Now if you’ve lost Consumer’s Union, you’ve lost the liberals. This same Consumer’s Union repeatedly called for a federal consumer advocacy agency, and mocked anyone who advocated for alternative medicine. Now they’re telling people not to bother with the Web presence of the program they always wanted to see.

The Wall Street Journal spoke about the other part of this fiasco: trying to sign up for Obamacare by phone.

By the way, we called the hotline on Monday and the automated menu redirected us to Healthcare.gov, which in turn told us to get in touch with someone at the call center.

Sound familiar? It should. Chances are, your local-monopoly cable or fiber-optic TV service tells you the same thing when you have trouble. But Big Brother Government was supposed to be better than that?

Well?!?

This from the Associated Press, through Newsmax.com:

Project developers who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity — because they feared they would otherwise be fired — said they raised doubts among themselves whether the website could be ready in time. They complained openly to each other about what they considered tight and unrealistic deadlines. One was nearly brought to tears over the stress of finishing on time, one developer said. Website builders saw red flags for months.

It’s a little late for that now.

What next?

Will the White House now delay the individual mandate? If they really believed this would work, they wouldn’t have rolled out such a megakludge of a Web site to begin with. And after they fought a knock-down, drag-out battle with Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Rand Paul (R-Ky.), they won’t delay it. They will refuse for the same reason they launched a site they knew would not work.

The only way to set this right is with your votes.

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