ObamaCare question aggravates Carney: ‘I give up’

Fresh questions about whether the White House deceived people with claims that they could bypass the broken HealthCare.gov website by using the phone or mailing in an application provoked an exasperated response Monday from White House press secretary Jay Carney.

“I give up,” Carney told ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl, accusing the correspondent of speaking “in tones of dramatic revelation” to inflate a story. 

{mosads}The exchange centered around documents released by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) on Monday.

Meeting notes from the administration “war room” handling the rollout of ObamaCare showed that consumers who called the ObamaCare hotline or applied for insurance would still have their information eventually entered on the glitchy HealthCare.gov website, which has been plagued by technical problems since its launch on Oct. 1.

“The paper applications allow people to feel like they are moving forward in the process and provides another option; at the end of the day, we are all stuck in the same queue,” one official wrote.

That prompted reporters to ask whether President Obama had been deceptive when he said during his recent address in the Rose Garden that consumers could bypass the website by phoning a call center or sending in a paper application.

Carney said that the White House “never pretended” that the call centers wouldn’t eventually route consumer information through the website. The point, he argued, was to shift the burden of waiting for the technical glitches to be ironed out from applicants to the government.

“In terms of the user experience, the whole point was to alleviate the frustration that so many Americans were having online and to take that frustration away from them and allow a live person at a call-in center to handle their questions and their sign-ups and their enrollment for them,” Carney said. “So I know it’s spoken in tones of dramatic revelation, but it was a known fact at the time.” 

Read more on The Hill.