‘By accident’ is not a valid excuse, by the way.

What we can learn from this story about Cover Oregon – yes, it’s the exchange with the songs – and its operating methodology:

1. Cover Oregon is still incapable of processing applications online.
2. Anyone who mailed an application will have at least a month’s lag time before they get a response.
3. If there’s a problem with the application, they’ll mail it back to the applicant. For ‘clarification.’
4. And then they’ll send over other people’s applications, too! Just in case the first applicant happened to know the answer, I suppose.

I would note here that #1 through #3 are not in fact good things. Or even bad things. They are no-good rotten things that would give a 1950s government bureaucrat cold chills at the thought of just how horribly his organizational grandchildren have made a mess of the system that he and his compatriots put together to keep the country running while America fought the Cold War. I want to note this because it’s important that people understand just how badly Barack Obama has failed with his signature program. He’s called into question the entire point of liberalism to begin with: a fact that will distress the people who won’t read this, even if it won’t particularly distress the people who will.

Anyway, the Statesman-Journal:

Valarie Henderson, 55, of Salem says she was already reluctant about applying for health insurance through Cover Oregon, the state’s new health insurance exchange. But after she received sensitive and personal information of complete strangers — also Cover Oregon applicants — in the mail, what little faith she had in the system evaporated.

“To have the very people you feel should be on your side and they’re being this incompetent …” Henderson said in disbelief.

Fortunately, there’s an easy answer to how this could have happened. Basically, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Kathleen Sebelius, Governor John Kitzhaber, and the rest of the Democratic party’s Obamacare supporters are incompetent, fumble-fingered buffoons. …I regret not being able to sugar-coat it for Ms. Henderson; but there you go. Sometimes the easy answer is the right one.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: Obviously, the site needs to go down until it’s fixed. More obviously, somebody needs to be fired – if only to make it clear to the survivors that stuff just got real. Most obvious of all? Neither event will happen.