Freedom Line Blog

Generation Opportunity, a national organization of young people focused on promoting liberty, presented the main contractor behind HealthCare.gov – the Obamacare website – with the first ever Youth Defender Award.

In a deliciously tongue-in-cheek press announcement released on Monday, Generation Opportunity noted that CGI Federal, the American subsidiary of the Canadian multinational CGI Group, has done “more than anyone to date to save young people from the increased costs and privacy invasions of Obamacare.”

Generation Opportunity continues:

“Sure, CGI is billing the government over 300% of their original contract, and taxpayers could be on the hook for $292 million dollars for the healthcare equivalent of Project ORCA. But no cost is too much to bear to help young people avoid this expensive and creepy law.

Generation Opportunity congratulates all the worthy candidates, including the runner-up, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who reminded young people on The Daily Show that they can get the same exemption from Obamacare as businesses by opting out and paying the penalty. After all, Sebelius had the foresight to hire CGI knowing they had a track record of protecting patients from government-run health care. The Canadian government had previously fired CGI’s parent company for failing to create a functioning website for Ontario’s medical registry.

Generation Opportunity developed the awesomely sardonic award in order to promote its OptOut.org website, which encourages young Americans to choose health insurance plans outside of the Obamacare exchanges.

The young folks at Generation Opportunity deserve an award themselves – for providing those of us who despise Obamacare with a big laugh.

Software glitches and tepid interest in the program have famously plagued Obamacare signup efforts since open enrollment began on October 1.

Now, more than two weeks in, hard numbers are leaking out that prove the failures of Obamacare registration efforts are more humiliating than anyone ever imagined.

The Obama administration announced a goal of 7 million enrollees in the new exchanges by the end of March. Embarrassingly, just 36,000 people completed Obamacare applications during the first week.

At that rate, fewer than a million Americans will sign up for the scheme by the March goal. The Obamacare enrollment website is receiving a good number of hits – nearly 9.5 million unique visitors in the first week – but a laughable .004 percent of the people who have visited healtcare.gov actually signed up for the service, according to Jeff Dunetz at “The Lid.”

State-specific Obamacare enrollment information is beginning to trickle in, as well, providing additional comic relief.

In the first two weeks, no one at all from Alaska enrolled in the Obamacare exchange. Zero out of 731,449 people. And that’s despite having one of the highest percentages of uninsured residents in the country.

What does that mean for Obamacare? It’s too early to say. But the more times the program can fall on its face in these early stages, the more likely it is that free market, limited government-minded lawmakers can eliminate the program – or at least gut the most reprehensible portions of the law – in years to come.