WASHINGTON – Republican senator John McCain called the “Obamacare website”
– healthcare.gov – a “fiasco” this weekend. USA Today reported that the online ordering system for health care insurance “may require constant fixes & updates” and an “eventual overhaul of the entire system.”
McCain told CNN he had a solution.
“Send Air Force One out to Silicon Valley, load it up with smart people, bring them back to Washington and fix this problem,” he said. “It’s ridiculous. And everybody knows that.”
On Sunday, federal government blog located at hhs.gov tried to explain the situation and the website issues. Here is what they reported:
Over the past two and a half weeks, millions of Americans visited HealthCare.gov to look at their new health care options under the Affordable Care Act. In that time, nearly half a million applications for coverage have been submitted from across the nation. This tremendous interest – with over 19 million unique visits to date to HealthCare.gov– confirms that the American people are looking for quality, affordable health coverage, and want to find it online.
Unfortunately, the experience on HealthCare.gov has been frustrating for many Americans. Some have had trouble creating accounts and logging in to the site, while others have received confusing error messages, or had to wait for slow page loads or forms that failed to respond in a timely fashion. The initial consumer experience of HealthCare.gov has not lived up to the expectations of the American people. We are committed to doing better.
Aside from the difficulties since launching the site, there are parts of the overall system that have proved up to the task. The “Data Hub,” component, which provides HealthCare.gov with information that aids in determining eligibility for qualified health plans, is working. Individuals have been able to verify their eligibility for credits, enabling them to shop for and enroll in low or even no-cost health plans.
WHAT HAPPENED – WHAT WE ARE WORKING ON
Since launch, when we first recognized these issues, we have been working around the clock to make improvements. We have updated the site several times with new code that includes bug fixes that have greatly improved the HealthCare.gov experience. The initial wave of interest stressed the account service, resulting in many consumers experiencing trouble signing up, while those that were able to sign up sometimes had problems logging in.
In response, we have made a number of improvements to the account service. Initially, we implemented a virtual “waiting room,” but many found this experience to be confusing. We continued to add more capacity in order to meet demand and execute software fixes to address the sign up and log in issues, stabilizing those parts of the service and allowing us to remove the virtual “waiting room.” Today, more and more individuals are successfully creating accounts, logging in, and moving on to apply for coverage and shop for plans. We’re proud of these quick improvements, but we know there’s still more work to be done. We will continue to conduct regular maintenance nearly every night to improve the experience.
TECH SURGE
To ensure that we make swift progress, and that the consumer experience continues to improve, our team has called in additional help to solve some of the more complex technical issues we are encountering.
Our team is bringing in some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government to scrub in with the team and help improve HealthCare.gov. We’re also putting in place tools and processes to aggressively monitor and identify parts of HealthCare.gov where individuals are encountering errors or having difficulty using the site, so we can prioritize and fix them. We are also defining new test processes to prevent new issues from cropping up as we improve the overall service and deploying fixes to the site during off-peak hours on a regular basis.
Don’t worry our supreme dictator is on tv today and will surround himself with some of the few supporters who signed up to tell the world how great it is.
@anonymous-Of the thirteen people that were standing behind him trying to show support for his latest failure, only seven had actually signed up. Just another one of his lies.
I’m not in the least surprised at this fiasco. The notices we businesses have received over the past years are hilarious because they are so sketchy, yet we have to explain them to our employees by certain deadlines or have them sign forms they never provide on time. The agents and insurance companies have no answers for us, either. Now I read that Blue Cross is canceling plans in a lot of states because they don’t meet the 10 requirements of the ACA. The new plans will likely have higher deductibles to be affordable. So Obama lied. You CAN’T keep your plan if you like it. And doctors everywhere are going to refuse to take patients with exchange insurance because of the low reimbursement rates.
The poor web development of the exchange sites is just a symptom of the entire plan. Total chaos, total lack of planning, total lack of leadership.
How did anyone actually believe Obama when he promised you could keep your insurance, or that premiums would go down? You can’t completely re-write the rules for insurance companies and not affect everyone else. That is what is so bad about Obamacare. According to information FROM THE DEMOCRATS when Obamacare was being pushed through, 30 million people in the country were without health insurance, about 10% of the population. Now we don’t know all of the particulars of those 30 million, why they didn’t have insurance. Maybe they are wealthy enough to self insure. Maybe they are self employed. Maybe a lot of them were students recently entering the workforce. Regardless, we had to rip health insurance for the other 90% of the population, just to extend coverage to the other 10%. And that is optimistic, even Obama said the ACA would really be extending coverage to about 7 millions people, or less than a third of the 30 million that he claimed were uninsured.
Keep in mind, all of those numbers are straight from the horse’s mouth. The conservatives have far worse numbers, that may or may not be more realistic.
What a crock. The half million applications are because they can not find out how much it will cost or whether they qualify without filling out a application. what I heard was a very large percentage of the applications were void because they were not filled out properly. They refuse to tell how many people are actually signed up and approved because they have no way of knowing. It is a Democrats fiasco plain and simple. We spent millions and millions of dollars on this and then they rushed it and screwed it all up. Kind of like the dog park.