Two weeks in, Obamacare website still broken

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.

(PHOTOS: 25 unforgettable Obamacare quotes)

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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Tech Expert to NBC Reporter on Obamacare Roll-Out: Without Changes, ‘This Project is Doomed’

In a report which aired on MSNBC on Thursday, NBC News reporter Tom Costello examined the software which users access in order to sign up for health insurance exchanges under the Affordable Care Act. The report was highly critical of the software on Healthcare.gov. Without significant changes, one expert said, the future of the ACA exchanges was in doubt.

Costello began by noting that some estimates, including a study performed by Millward Brown Digital, note that less than one percent of visitors to Healthcare.gov were able to purchase insurance.

“Amateur hour,” said software programing company owner Luke Chung. “It looks like it was created by someone who’s never delivered commercial software before.”

“Programming experts say a lot of work needs to be done,” Costello reported.

“If they don’t change management, this project is doomed,” Chung concluded. “Because we’ve already seen what the existing management considers ready for shipping. And it’s not.”

RELATED: Analysis: 0.4% of All HealthCare.Gov Visitors Enrolled in First Week

In a follow up conversation with MSNBC anchor Thomas Roberts and Washington Post reporter Juliet Eilperin, they noted that insurance exchanges on the state level appear to be functioning but the federal version of that system has not functioned as expected.

“So how is the White House supposed to respond to this?” Roberts asked. “Because is the onus supposed to be on the state or the federal government taking responsibility for it, or is this a purposeful way to make it look so messy so that there has to be something more done?”

Eilperin said that this was a question for the administration. She again noted that the government has not released statistics about how many insurance shoppers have been able to sign up for the exchanges.

Via: Mediaite.com

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Visits to Obamacare Site Plummet

Obamacare’s newly launched website lost nearly 88 percent of visitors in its first two weeks of operation.

The numerous glitches on HealthCare.gov prevented many users from applying for health insurance under Obamacare, theWashington Post reported.

Out of the 9.47 million unique visitors to the website in the first week, only one million were able to register for an account. Meanwhile, 271,000 successfully logged into their accounts, 196,000 began enrollment, but only 36,000– less than one percent of visitors– were able to fully enroll.

The Post reported:

In a blog post, Millward Brown Digital Vice President Matthew Pace, who called the first week’s performance “atrocious,” noted that the numbers could change dramatically once the federal government improves how the Web site functions.

“The fact that millions of Americans not only visited the exchanges but also took what actions they could to register and enroll suggests that demand indeed exists for new healthcare options,” Pace wrote.” As the site improves and more consumers are able to compare their coverage options, they’ll decide with their wallets how truly affordable Obamacare turns out to be.”

At the moment, Americans’ interest in logging on has dropped sharply from the time of the launch. In an interview, Pace compared the initial number of users to the kind of traffic Target.com experiences, noting that about 0.9 percent of all online users logged onto HealthCare.gov during the first week. As of Oct. 13 that reach had declined to 0.1 percent, he said. Last week, he estimated, the site attracted 4.1 million visitors, or less than half of what it garnered during its first week.

Via: WFB

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Analysis: Only 36K Signed Up for Health Care Through Federal Exchange in First Week of Operation

Millward Brown Digital, a consultancy firm, released an analysis today estimating that only 36,000 people had signed up for insurance through the federal Obamacare exchange website.

According to Millward Brown Digital, there were 9.47 million unique visitors to healthcare.gov from the site’s launch on October 1 through October 5. Of those visitors, 1.3 million left the website for their state-run exchange and 3.72 million attempted to create an account on the site. Only 1.01 million successfully did so.

A total of 271,000 people logged into their created account, 27 percent of those who managed to register. The difficulty logging in made the “I’m having trouble logging in to my marketplace account” page one of the most popular on the site with 214,000 people seeking guidance.

Only 196,000 began the enrollment process, which is over 30 steps long. Most didn’t finish it. Altogether, 36,000 people completed enrollment in an insurance plan. That’s a grand total of 1 percent of people who attempted to register on the federal site, and a lower figure than reported by the Daily Mail, which said 51,000 had enrolled during the first week.

The analysis says that “Healthcare.gov was clearly unprepared to handle the huge spike in traffic witnessed on October 1st when it was visited by .9% (or 1 in 114) of everyone online in the U.S. This is roughly equivalent to the daily traffic on Target.com.”

Via: NRO

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