Politics
HealthCare.gov website overhauled – crucial weekend as subscribers begin to access service
The HealthCare.gov website is the main way for people in 36 states to sign up for healthcare coverage under the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
The Obama administration hopes eventually to enroll about 7 million uninsured and under-insured Americans in 2014, with many of those consumers expected to qualify for subsidies.
The healthcare overhaul is Obama’s signature domestic achievement, a program designed to extend coverage and reduce healthcare costs. Opponents, including many Republicans, view it as a massive government intervention into private medicine that will inflate healthcare costs.
To work, the program must enroll millions of young, healthy consumers whose participation in the new insurance exchanges is key to keeping costs in check.
On Friday evening, ahead of the Obama administration’s self-imposed Saturday deadline to get the insurance shopping website working for the “vast majority,” the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced it was taking down the website for an unusually long 11-hour maintenance period.
The website’s account creation and log-in functions appeared to work smoothly by 8 a.m.EST on Saturday, avoiding the crash and error messages seen at its launch. But technology specialists told reporters that it would be difficult to independently assess whether the site has met the goal of functioning for most users most of the time, including handling 50,000 users at once.
“There won’t be anything you can tell from the outside,” said Jonathan Wu, an information technology expert and co-founder of the consumer financial website ValuePenguin.
