The Obama administration is expected to give a fuller picture Sunday
of whether it met its self-imposed November 30 deadline to allow 50,000
people to access the federal healthcare exchange website
simultaneously.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have scheduled a
press conference for 9 a.m. to discuss the progress of the site,
Healthcare.gov.
Obama administration officials said Saturday that the site had
"performed well" and that upgrades overnight Friday had improved
response times and reduced errors. The site was taken offline between 9
p.m. Friday and 8 a.m. Eastern time Saturday, in addition to its regular
maintenance window, which falls between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. Eastern time
Sunday.
"With the scheduled upgrades last night and tonight, we're on track
to meet our stated goal for the site to work for the vast majority of
users," CMS spokesman Aaron Albright told Fox News earlier Saturday.
CMS spokeswoman Julie Bataille said the installation of new servers
Friday night helped improved the response times and error rates, even
with heavier-than-usual weekend traffic.
Though President Obama and other administration officials have tried
to downplay the deadline, saying fixes are an ongoing effort, a lot is
riding on the site’s performance this weekend, including upcoming
elections as well as Americans’ confidence in the president and his
signature health-care law, which depends on their participation to work.
The Washington Post reported hours before that the administration was
prepared to announce Sunday that they have met deadlines for improving
HealthCare.gov. However, technicians failed to reach the deadline to fix
at least some of the glitches, according to the newspaper.
Official have repeatedly said in recent weeks that the site would
after the deadline be able to accommodate the “vast majority” of online
shoppers.
The White House says it's made numerous upgrades in both software and
hardware over the last month, which also will allow the site to handle
more than 800,000 visitors a day.
Still, in the days leading up to the deadline, the White House and
the Department of Health and Human Services continued to scale back
expectations, saying not to expect the site to be 100 percent
glitch-free.
"If there are extraordinarily high spikes in traffic, which exceed
the site's capacity, consumers will be put in a new, advanced queuing
system that will give them an expected wait time, or allow them to be
notified via when they can return to the site," Bataille said Monday.
Obama recently said he'd consider a "fix" to be successful if 80
percent of the people are able to navigate the site without a major
problem.
The nation's largest health insurer trade group said significant problems remain.
Karen Ignagni, president and CEO of America's Health Insurance Plans,
told the Associated Press that 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.
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.
Democrats and Republicans will be closely watching the site this
weekend. With the midterm elections less than a year away, it's vital to
Democrats that the site lives up to expectations the president set.
Republicans have already suggested they'll launch coordinated attacks
linking every congressional Democrat up for re-election to the
Affordable Care Act.
In the House, the effort, based around dozens of votes to repeal the
law, is about denying Democrats the 17-seat gain they would need to win
back the majority. In the Senate, it's about gaining the six seats
Republicans need to take control of that chamber.
It was announced earlier this week that Families USA, a
self-proclaimed non-partisan organization, has been given a $1.1 million
grant to establish a database of ObamaCare "success stories."
Families USA received the money from the Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation on Oct. 4. The grant is meant to help Families USA expand the
database of “real people” sharing their stories of enrolling in
ObamaCare.
News of the grant has been revealed in the same week that the White
House announced two more delays related to the president's landmark
health care reform law.
On Wednesday, it was announced that it would delay the launch of an
online portal to the health insurance marketplace for small businesses
until November 2015. Officials said that the decision to delay the
launch had been taken because making repairs to the federal health
exchange site, Healthcare.gov took priority.
The administration also announced that the launch of a Spanish-language sign-up tool would have to be postponed.
In recent weeks, the White House has also pushed back the enrollment
deadline for individuals to December 23, given businesses with more than
50 workers until 2015 to provide required health insurance without
paying a penalty, and moved the deadline date for individuals to avoid
penalties for failing to get coverage back for six weeks.
There was also an announced schedule change in next year's open
enrollment season. It will start on Nov. 15, 2014, a month later than
originally scheduled, and finish on Jan. 15, 2015, about five weeks
later than originally planned. Bailey Comment: "Do you think that a lot of visits to this site was to shop for insurance or just to see if the site works now"?