During a segment on Wednesday night's "O'Reilly Factor," Fox News reporter James Rosen sternly corrected Republican talk show host Bill O'Reilly after O'Reilly continually insisted that the Affordable Care Act's insurance exchanges are "not working" after less than three days of availability and must be significantly changed or thrown out.
"The problem now is you have a law that's been passed, that's been legitimately passed and upheld by the Supreme Court, that's falling apart. It's falling apart," O'Reilly said roughly four minutes into his "Talking Points Memo" segment (watch below).
"That's not clear, Bill," Rosen insisted. "That's not clear."
"Oh, it's clear to me, Rosen," O'Reilly replied. "And if you just hang around for the next segment I'll prove it to you. This law is falling apart, and it seems to me that it's incumbent on our leadership of both parties to admit, 'It's not working right. It's not really working out well.' And then let's try to find a solution within the framework of making it better..."
Rosen didn't budge, hedging a bit by saying he did not endorse the Affordable Care Act, but reminding O'Reilly that the exchanges have only just opened.
"What I'm about to say to you, Bill, does not require me to endorse or condemn Obamacare," he said. "I'm just going to traffick in facts with you for a moment here."
Rosen went on to call health reform "an ambitious program," and compared it to the U.S. government's efforts to defeat fascism, land a man on the moon and fight the communists in Vietnam.
"All of those ventures, if you look back at the first three years, you'd see that all of those ventures involved glitches, stops and starts, major problems, minor problems," he said. "To say that it's not working, when the exchanges went online yesterday, I think is premature."
"It's not premature, because..." O'Reilly began. "Wait, wait. I gotta go, because we're up against a hard break."
The Department of Health and Human Services said that over 6 million people visited Healthcare.gov by Wednesday afternoon, and millions more logged on to state-based exchanges. In New York alone, 2.5 million people visited the state exchange in just its first half-hour online, according to Forbes.
Fox News and other conservative media have crowed about technical problems with the federally-run site, however experts say this was largely caused by massive traffic from people in the 34 states which have opted not to establish exchanges for their citizens.
While the government has not yet said how many health insurance policies the exchange sold on its first day, the administration is adding server capacity to help speed the process along for the millions of Americans waiting to buy affordable care, many for the first time. That can only help in its ongoing effort to address the needs of 48 million Americans currently without basic health care services.
To Bill O'Reilly, that apparently sounds like abject failure. But to anyone getting their first checkup this week after years without even a single visit to a doctor, it makes all the difference in the world.
This video is from Fox News, broadcast Wednesday, October. 2, 2013 -- Government shutdown
Photo: Screenshot via FoxNews.com.