joining me now, florida congresswoman debbie wasserman schultz, jonathan grubeman, professor of economics. he helped craft the affordable care act, and michael smerconish, an msnbc contributor. michael, i want to start with you. you have been struggling dealing with this affordable care act, trying to get coverage for you and your family. but it sound like you had something of a breakthrough today. i have had a horrific experience since october 1st, lawrence. in fact, i remember naively waking up at 5:00 a.m. on the day of the launch, thinking i would go on the site, explore my options, go on the radio and say here they are for my family of five. for eight weeks, could not get any satisfaction online until today. i m online right now in real time, in fact, i don t think you ll bow able to see it too clearly hold it up, we ll try. all right, there are the 24
assistance as well. jonathan, take us back to the massachusetts experience when they initiated the experience there, and what was the website usage? how much of a factor was that in getting it started? it wasn t as big an issue. it s like the congresswoman was mentioning. we had a lot of use of navigator-like entities to help especially low income people to find their insurance options. a lot more use of the phone. what s more important is we really just weren t as focused on it in the early days because there wasn t this enormous opposition that was focused on every minute s numbers. we recognize we re in a long-run process and we didn t focus that much on who was using the web and who was want in the first few month. the relevant point was the end of the year who signed up. it s great the website is rolling forward, but the timeframe is not to worry about what is happening today. it s by the time we get to the enrollment deadline, folks can use the website and enroll, use the nav