A Partial, 3-Day Shutdown for HealthCare.Gov

Consumers won’t be able to find out their eligibility for federal health insurance subsidies on HealthCare.gov for much of the next three days because of scheduled maintenance, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said Friday.

The Internal Revenue Service will be conducting maintenance on a system that allows HealthCare.gov to check whether applicants qualify for federal subsidies. The system will go down Saturday night and won’t be available again until Tuesday morning, the spokeswoman said.

Even though applicants won’t be able to check their subsidy eligibility, they’ll still be able to create accounts, shop for health plans and enroll, CMS says. The troubledHealthCare.gov website will also be offline every day for its regular early-morning maintenance.

Government contractors continue to make upgrades to the site. Jeffrey Zients, the former budget official who’s been brought in to clean up the HealthCare.gov mess, said on a call with reporters Friday that even as new fixes have been made, increased traffic volume is “exposing new storage capacity and software issues.”

“We made progress this week although we hit roadblocks that impacted the user experience this week and slowed us down,” Mr. Zients said, adding that the government is still on track to having the site working for most users by the end of November.

Via: WSJ

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Obamacare adviser says healthcare website encountering new issues

(Reuters) - The Obama administration's HealthCare.gov adviser Jeffrey Zeints said on Friday that the trouble-plagued federal healthcare website is improving, but that higher volumes of visitors are exposing new capacity and software issues.

In a conference call with reporters, Zeints said progress this week has been marred by roadblocks. He described HealthCare.gov as being "a long way from where it needs to be."

The administration is struggling to resolve problems with the website by the end of November, when it has pledged to have the system operating smoothly for the vast number of users including uninsured people interested in obtaining subsidized private health insurance.

Via: Reuters

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[VIDEO] Software Expert Slams Healthcare.Gov On MSNBC: ‘This Really Shouldn’t Be That Difficult’

MSNBC’s Chris Jansing brought software expert Luke Chung onto Thursday’s Jansing & Co. to analyze the federal government’s troubled healthcare.gov website. Chung, the founder and president of software and database programming company FMS, served up a scathing indictment of the website that left Jansing reeling at certain points during the interview. [See video below the break. MP3 audio here.]

Jansing started by asking how complicated it was to get healthcare.gov up and running. Chung was very frank with her: “I don't know why they made it so complicated. This really shouldn't be that difficult.” Jansing fumbled around, talking about other countries and states that have launched similar programs before playing administration advocate:
 

"[B]ut is it a little bit like comparing apples and oranges because the number of people involved in this and the number of states is so big and so much bigger than had been anticipated?"
 

Chung called that an “excuse” and said that his experience on the website, as an informed shopper, was awful. He added, “It is just an awful website built by people who really are specializing in getting government contracts and not necessarily delivering technical expertise.”

Jansing then started grasping at straws. As the camera zoomed in on her computer screen, she explained that earlier that morning, she had been unable to access the page that lists plans in her area, but now that page was coming up fine. That glimmer of hope led her to ask this question: “If this should have been simple in the first place, could it be simple to fix because already, just from my limited experience, this little portion of it seems to have gotten better.”

Via: Newsbusters

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