Health Care Website Recovering

The Obama adminstration says it has made big improvements in its website for enrolling in new health insurance plans.The website is still not perfect, but the strides made raise the prospects that the website will be able to help millions of Americans buy policies from private insurers on new insurance exchanges either by December 23, the deadline for policies that will take effect on Januray 1, or by March 31, the deadline for taking out coverage without being fined. There will be federal subsidies to help those on modest incomes pay the premiums. The website, HealthCare.gov, was supposed to be ready on October 1 which has been about two months already, but an array of technical problems made it impossible for all but a small numer trickle of customers to compare policies and enroll in a plan. For some weeks in October, the site was down 60 percent of the time. That dire situation at the front end of the process has been largely corrected through a frantic repair effort over the past five weeks, but it won’t be enough unless the final back-end stage of enrollment is fixed as well.The administration issued a progress report asserting that the system was running smoothly for a vast majority of users, that the site was now working more than 90 percent of the time, and that consumers were getting much better feedback from the site than before. Thanks to the computer nerds and the software and hardware improvements, the average page is loading way faster than it did before, and the number of frustrating error messages that block people from using the site has fallen too.

 The administration estimated that the site could support 50,000 users at the same time, that users spend an average of 20 to 30 minutes a day on it which is not too long, and that the site can support 800,000 visits a day. We won’t know how accurate those projections are until that many users try to use it. The website serves 36 states, but many other states have set up their own exchanges, several of which are working better than the federal exchanges.The next challenge ahead is to upgrade the back-end systems that transmit information to insurance companies so that they can complete the enrollment process. Consumers have until December 23 to sign up for policies which are effective on Januray 1, leaving only three weeks to solve the back-end problem. In some cases, insurers have no record of some people who think they have enrolled or have received inaccurate or incomplete information for some enrollees.Its good to hear that the website is progressing and not at a bad plateau like it was a couple a months ago,im pretty sure the democrats are tired of the republicans scolding them about all the problems with the website,well its working better than what it did before,i hope it stays that way so uninsured people could get insured.