On the recordOctober 1, 2013
As chair of the HELP Committee--that great committee upon which the Presiding Officer also sits and a valuable member of that committee--I was just informed by our staff that as of this last hour, over 2.8 million people have gone on healthcare.gov to get information and sign up for the Affordable Care Act. In fact, there were so many people online that at different places in the country, the Web site froze. Then I heard some of my Republican friends were saying: See, we told you it wasn't ready. The Web site is not working right. If very few people had signed up, they would have said: See, we told you no one is going to sign up for it. They are trying to have it both ways. There were 2.8 million Americans on the first day logged on to healthcare.gov to get this information, and, again, to sign up. By tomorrow we will have some data and some statistics on how many people who not only inquired but have actually signed up on the Web sites. We will have some more information on that tomorrow. Obviously, the interest is there, and we knew it would be. Leader Reid told a story today about how years ago he went out and visited Google in California. At the time they were telling him that when they first started Google, they didn't realize how many people would be using it, and they kept crashing and freezing. So they had glitches of their own. There are some glitches in this system because a lot of people are coming on and wanting the information and wanting to sign up.…
