WASHINGTON - The Obama administration said it was on track to meet its self-imposed deadline of fixing the health-care website so that 50,000 people could log in at the same time starting late Saturday.
Round-the-clock repair work since healthcare.gov went live on Oct. 1 has resulted in 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.
Administration officials said healthcare.gov was “performing well” Saturday, the deadline set to have it working smoothly for the “vast majority of users,” after hardware upgrades late Friday to boost server capacity. The deadline fell during a long holiday weekend when traffic to the site likely would have been slower anyway and at a level unlikely to expose new technical problems.
More hardware upgrades and software fixes were planned for overnight Saturday to further improve speed and reduce errors.
“With upgrades last night and those planned for tonight, the team is continuing its ongoing work to make healthcare.gov work smoothly for the vast majority of users,” Julie Bataille, communications director for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said Saturday in a blog post. That agency oversees the healthcare website and is a division of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Underscoring the delicate state of repairs, the White House on Friday urged consumers using healthcare.gov to shop during off-peak hours. The administration has also asked its supporters to hold off promoting the website, which enrolled just 248 people in its first two days of operation in October because of software errors.
Meanwhile, the automated part of the Obamacare enrollment system used to pay insurers won’t be ready until spring, said Aaron Albright, a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services spokesman.
Additional data on the website’s progress were to be released today by Jeffrey Zients, the website’s chief troubleshooter.
President Barack 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,” Ignagni said.
And Republicans in Congress have described the website flaws as emblematic of larger troubles with the law.
“Americans are far less concerned about a website than they are about the availability and affordability of their health care,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a statement.
“The White House has tried to dismiss stories about folks losing insurance by saying they had lousy plans to begin with, and that those Americans should be happy that the government is now forcing them to get a different one,” said McConnell, a Kentucky Republican. “But what so many have discovered is that Obamacare is actually worse.”
Some Senate Democrats, including Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, have also pressed for changes.
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.
Some companies have expressed worries about a potential deluge.
“It’s a significant concern,” said Wayne Powell, vice president of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City. “If we get a deluge, assuming the website pipeline opens up, it’s going to be very challenging,”
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.
For the system to be successful, the administration has said it needs large numbers of mostly younger, healthy people to buy coverage to help offset the cost of insuring older people who generally use more healthcare services. Federal subsidies are available to those who qualify to help lower the cost of insurance.
Katrina McGivern is a “navigator” - members of some 100 organizations nationwide who have received government grants to help people sign up for coverage. They’ve been stymied by the same technical problems that have thwarted individual consumers, and many say they have become worn down and discouraged.
“There was so much concern and discourse surrounding [the health-care law] to begin with. For this to happen made people withdraw a little more,” said McGivern, communications coordinator for the Kansas Association for the Medically Underserved.
McGivern said that between the website’s troubles and the holiday season, her group will probably put off its enrollment push until after the start of the new year.
Paige Ashley, a navigator in Topeka, Kan., said she was thrilled last week when she guided two women all the way through the enrollment process without much difficulty. Both yelled with joy when they learned that hefty federal subsidies would help them pay their premiums, Ashley said.
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.
Conflicting explanations were given for the decision, and contractors working on the site told lawmakers that there wasn’t enough time for testing before the system went live.
The team working to fix healthcare.gov has repaired more than 300 bugs, Zients said. The teams working to fix the website have been moving at “private-sector speed” with “ruthless prioritization at all times as to what matters most,” he said.
Among the changes: If the website’s capacity is exceeded, users will be placed in a “customer-friendly queuing system which would notify you when to come back to the site and sort of be first in line,” Zients said.
“We’ve obviously brought forward the most important bugs,” he said. “Inevitably, as more and more users use the system - which they are every day - we find some new ones. But for the most part, they’re not nearly as significant as the original bugs.” Information for this article was contributed by Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Darlene Superville of The Associated Press; by Sandhya Somashekhar of The Washington Post; by Noam N. Levey and Kathleen Hennessey of the Tribune Washington Bureau; and by Michael C. Bender, Mike Dorning, Shannon Pettypiece, Alex Nussbaum and Mark Niquette of Bloomberg News.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/01/2013