Washington: Two months after the disastrous launch of a key component of President Barack Obama’s healthcare law, administration officials yesterday said they had achieved their goal of getting HealthCare.gov operating smoothly but warned the website will need more fixes.
Obama’s specially appointed adviser Jeffrey Zients said a five-week emergency “tech surge” had doubled the capacity of the online health insurance portal while making it more responsive and less prone to errors.
“The bottom line: HealthCare.gov on December 1 is night and day from where it was on October 1,” Zients told reporters a day after the administration’s self-imposed November 30 deadline for making the website operate properly for the vast majority of users.
“We’ve widened the system’s on-ramp — it now has four lanes instead of one or two,” he said. “We have a much more stable system that is reliably open for business.”
The administration’s key achievement was to increase site capacity to 50,000 simultaneous users, which would allow HealthCare.gov to handle a minimum of 800,000 users per day.
But Zients warned that peak traffic volumes could eclipse the new capacity, temporarily preventing visitors from completing online applications for subsidised health coverage. And officials acknowledge that the site is still unlikely to operate smoothly for some visitors, even when volumes are within its capabilities.
Reuters
