TWO VIEWS
”We are confident that we’re on track to achieve our goal to make HealthCare.gov operate smoothly for the vast majority of users by the end of the month.”
Jeff Zients, chief website troubleshooter
“Until the enrollment process is working from end to end, many consumers will not be able to enroll in coverage.”
Karen Ignani, president and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans
The Obama administration said it would meet its self-imposed deadline of fixing the troubled health care website so that 50,000 people could log in at the same time, starting late Saturday. Yet questions remain about the stability of the site, the volume of traffic it can handle and the quality of the data it is delivering to insurers.
Round-the-clock repair work since HealthCare.gov went live on Oct. 1 has produced fewer errors, and pages are loading faster.
But the site still won’t be able to do everything the administration wanted, and companion sites for small businesses and Spanish speakers have been delayed.
Still, the White House hopes a website that is operating more smoothly after weeks of bad publicity about its troubles will mark a fresh start for Obama and the signature domestic initiative of his presidency.
Administration officials said HealthCare.gov was working well Saturday, the deadline set to have it working smoothly for the “vast majority of users,” after overnight hardware upgrades to boost its capacity. Software fixes to further improve speed and reduce errors were planned for overnight during the long holiday weekend, presumably a time when traffic to the health care website would be low.
Additional data on the website’s progress was to be released today by Jeff Zients, the website’s chief troubleshooter.
Obama promised a few weeks ago that HealthCare.gov “will work much better on Nov. 30, Dec. 1 than it worked certainly on Oct. 1.” But, in trying to lower expectations, he said he could not guarantee that “100 percent of the people 100 percent of the time going on this website will have a perfectly seamless, smooth experience.”
The nation’s largest health insurer trade group said significant problems remain.
Karen Ignagni, president and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans, said insurers have complained that enrollment data sent to them from the website include too much incorrect, duplicative, garbled or missing information. She said the problems must be cleared up to guarantee consumers the coverage they signed up for effective Jan. 1.
“Until the enrollment process is working from end to end, many consumers will not be able to enroll in coverage,” Ignani said.
The first big test of the repaired website probably won’t come for another couple of weeks, when an enrollment surge is expected as consumers rush to meet a Dec. 23 deadline so their coverage can kick in on the first of the year.
Avoiding a break in coverage is particularly important for millions of people whose current individual policies were canceled because they don’t meet the standards of the health care law, as well as for a group of about 100,000 in an expiring federal program for high-risk patients.
The law requires most people who don’t have health insurance to buy coverage or pay fines.
If HealthCare.gov seizes up again at crunch time, the White House may have to yield to congressional demands for extensions or delays in key requirements of the law, such as the individual requirement to get covered.
Delaying the individual mandate, in turn, could lead to higher future premiums, since healthy people would no longer have an incentive to sign up.
For the system to be successful, the administration needs large numbers of mostly younger, healthy people to buy coverage to help offset the cost of insuring older people who generally use more health care services. Federal subsidies are available to those who qualify to help lower the cost of insurance.
As a result of the website troubles, HealthCare.gov, which services 36 states, signed up just 27,000 people in October, while the 14 states that run their own websites enrolled 79,000. The total of roughly 106,000 was far off the administration’s estimate that nearly 500,000 people would enroll within the first month of the six-month enrollment period.
When the website went live on Oct. 1, it locked up right away. Consumers could not get past a balky page that required them to create accounts before moving on to the next step. The system also did not allow window shopping, which experts said was a departure from standard e-commerce practices and contributed to overloading.
Obama said this week that despite opposition to the law by Republicans and others, and the past two months of problems, he believes it will work out in the long run.
“I continue to believe and (I’m) absolutely convinced that at the end of the day, people are going to look back at the work we’ve done to make sure that in this country, you don’t go bankrupt when you get sick, that families have that security,” Obama told ABC News. “That is going be a legacy I am extraordinarily proud of.”
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