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The administration's self-imposed deadline for fixing the troubled Obamacare website is three days away, and while officials say the experience will be much better than the disastrous October rollout, they aren't exactly planning a party for take two of the site launch.
The president has a lot hanging on the promise to repair the portal by December 1—approval ratings, political infighting, Americans' trust, and the reputation and future of his signature health care law, to name a few small stakes. So, hoping to avoid another round of glitches, outages, sluggish load times, and error messages caused by an overwhelming flood of traffic, the administration is quietly trying to stop too many people racing out to enroll this weekend.
Officials speaking to the New York Times and Talking Points Memo said the White House held private meetings with partner organizations to put the brakes on a former plan to start out December with a big publicity push. It talked to groups like the Service Employees International Union, Enroll America, and Planned Parenthood about slowing down recruiting efforts to a more gradual pace.
Still, experts expect a surge of uninsured Americans who are tired of waiting and have some free time to kill post-Thanksgiving to visit Healthcare.gov over the weekend and try to sign up. The site can now handle 50,000 visitors at once—about 800,000 a day—officials say. But the tech experts overseeing Obamacare repairs estimate Saturday could bring as many as 250,000 concurrent visitors to the exchange. So the Feds are trying to manage expectations.
“Our concern is that we want to make sure that people have the right expectation going into this,” White House communications director Jennifer Palmieri told the Times. “Early October was a frustrating experience for users. We are preparing for the outcome that we have as many or more visitors as we had on Oct. 1.”
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid communications director Julie Bataille delivered a similar line to reporters on Monday: "There will be times when volume on healthcare.gov will exceed this demand, and we are preparing for that."
Then yet again, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius told press yesterday that the rescue mission is on track to see a "significantly different user experience" come Saturday, but that "this isn't a magic 'turn on the on switch.'"
To sum it up: The site is basically fixed, but not completely, and you should definitely enroll, just not everyone at once.
So what should folks hoping to join the roughly 200,000 Americans who have signed up for Obamacare so far expect this weekend? Well, the president's goal was for the site to now work for the "vast majority" of users—roughly 80 percent. Not a terrible rate, though from a political point of view a 20 percent failure rate isn't going to do much to stop the field day Republicans are having over the Affordable Care Act's tortured launch. But though the enrollment rates are increasing in many state exchanges as the technical bugs are addressed, the long-term outlook is still grim. Many of the site’s problems are due to a shoddy fundamental infrastructure, and the engineers tasked with repairing the insurance marketplace face a long road ahead.
For the December 1 deadline, the administration prioritized addressing insufficient server capacity, slow load times, and error messages from mistakes in the code. But even once those glitches are smoothed over, a torrent of traffic could cause other issues. Insurance companies say they're still being sent incorrect or incomplete user information from the exchange portal, and aren't looking forward to handling bad data from 50,000 simultaneous visitors.
What's more, up to 40 percent of the portal is still under construction, according to Obamacare’s chief developer Henry Chao. Certain parts of the back-end, including a system to send payments to insurance companies, are still being developed and won’t be available by this weekend.
The safest bet is to use Healthcare.gov for something akin to window shopping, officials say. Users shouldn't experience technical problems browsing plans to shop for coverage. But once you pick a plan, you might want to call up the insurance company to complete the signup process, just in case.