WASHINGTON: The man appointed by US President Barack Obama to overhaul a bungled health care website rollout has said that it had undergone “night and day” improvements in handling online traffic.
The White House had admitted that the launch of Healthcare.gov, where people can sign up for health insurance, had been a debacle, but promised that the vast majority of potential customers would be able to enroll online by the end of November.
“The site now has the capacity to handle 50,000 concurrent or simultaneous users at one time … so the site will support more than 800,000 consumer visits a day,” said Jeffrey Zients, an Obama advisor recently appointed to troubleshoot and deliver solutions to those trying to fix the troubled website.
“We’ve doubled the system’s capacity and Healthcare.gov can now support its intended volume,” he said during a conference call with reporters.
Additionally, the website is running successfully 90 per cent of the time, up from an estimated 42.9 per cent through much of October.
Julie Bataille, communications director for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said that 80 per cent of users are now able to apply for health insurance successfully on the site.
Healthcare.gov’s rollout on October 1 sent Obama’s approval rating tanking and pushed his fellow Democrats into open revolt at times and sparked an opening for gleeful Republicans opposed to the President’s health reforms.
Only approximately 27,000 people were able to subscribe for insurance via Healthcare.gov in October, according to official figures.
Obama campaigned in 2008 on the promise of insuring some 30 million Americans who lacked health insurance.
“We developed a prioritized punch-list of software fixes, hardware upgrades and user enhancements with the prioritizing based on what has the biggest impact on system stability, capacity, speed and user experience,” Zients said.
Those improvements include implementation of a technical support centre monitoring the website 24 hours a day and the elimination of more than 400 bugs.
Significant problems
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.
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.-AFP, AP
Thank You For Your Vote!
Sorry You have Already Voted!
