The Obamacare enrollment website remains badly broken despite two weeks of intensive round-the-clock efforts at repairs.HHS isn’t making any predictions about how long it will take to fix it — or rebuild it. But advocates, lobbyists and industry officials are talking about it as a months-long repair effort.
How many months is an open question — and one with big consequences for the massive effort to enroll 7 million people in the new insurance exchanges and millions more in Medicaid by the end of March. People trying to switch from their current insurance into subsidized exchange plans could also face gaps.
A two-month delay, for instance, would be a different scenario than five or six months, particularly since people can face penalties if they don’t apply by mid-February.
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In the meantime, few people can get through the enrollment process online. According to some analysts like Millward Brown Digital, thousands of consumers have stopped trying, at least for now.
At a summit of health care advocacy groups at the Newseum on Tuesday, the audience was asked how many had successfully made it through HealthCare.gov even far enough to browse the selection of health plans. Only two out of about 70 people raised their hands.
The administration hasn’t said much about the nature of the technical problems. Officials initially described them as the kind of “glitches” that inevitably occur in a tech launch, and attributed them to the high interest in new health coverage options that drove unexpectedly high traffic to HealthCare.gov.
Via: Politico
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