Obamacare Exchange Website Glitches: Liberals And Conservatives Both Claim Victory Amid Healthcare.gov Errors

Websites for the Affordable Care Act’s health-insurance exchanges went live on Tuesday, but they aren’t exactly going off without a glitch.

Countless Twitter users have reported technical problems with the Obamacare websites, ranging from error messages to faulty drop-down menus to websites being completely offline. Glitches were reported for websites in several parts of the country, including California, New York and the District of Columbia. Many users posted screenshots of internal server errors and, in some cases, nonsensical text.

Conservatives and others in the anti-Obamacare camp wasted no time gleefully calling out the glitches as validation for their stance that the healthcare exchanges are certain to be doomed by government ineptitude:

On the flip side of the ideological battle, Democrats and other Obamacare supporters simply saw the glitches as a sign of overwhelming demand for the service:

Healthcare.gov, the national website for the Health Insurance Marketplace, went live at midnight on Oct. 1, just as Congress had reached a budget stalemate that resulted in a government shutdown. The site’s official Twitter account, @HealthCareGov, acknowledged the website glitches on Tuesday in a series of tweets, attempting to assure the American public that technicians are working to resolve the issues.

In the meantime, as no shortage of Twitter users pointed out, the best thing to do might be ride out the glitches and check back with the website in a few days, once the initial traffic boom has died down. The open enrollment period for 2014 health coverage lasts through March 31.

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