Aa
ACA weathering the storm
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/obamacare-weathering-storm
The Obama administration is about to reach its self-imposed deadline to fix HealthCare.gov by the end of the month, and the White House appears set to claim victory – at least a partial one.
The administration is expected to announce Sunday that the site will be functional for the vast majority of users. In other words, the public will be able to use a website that allows applicants to find subsidies they qualify for, compare private plans, and, ultimately, enroll.
There is still plenty of work to be done, and key questions about the site’s performance won’t be answered until traffic ramps up in the coming weeks. But 60 days since the health care exchanges debuted, the sense of crisis surrounding the Affordable Care Act (ACA)—driven by the twin challenges of a dysfunctional website and a flood of cancellation notices sent by insurers—is waning.
After weeks of intense work by a team of outside consultants on leave from Google and other major tech firms, the site’s capacity has been doubled to handle 50,000 simultaneous users, or up to 800,000 per day, the administration said this week.
That has already led to a boost in signups. Between Sunday and Tuesday, nearly 20,000 people—the most for a three-day period—successfully enrolled in the federal online exchanges, according to the New York Times. During the entire month of October, just 27,000 did so. The site has also seen major performance enhancements since its launch in October.
President Obama has said fixing the site is just one piece of improving the signup process. “Part of what we’re realizing is that they are going to be a certain portion of people who are just going to need more help and more handholding in the application process,” he told reporters earlier this month. “And so I guess part of the continuous improvement that I’m looking at is not just a technical issue. It’s also, can we streamline the application process? What are we doing to give people more assistance in the application process? How do the call centers and the people who are helping folks in-person – how are they trained so that things can go more smoothly?”
Making it easier to sign up has emerged as the most pressing issue concerning the health care law. If it remains difficult, that could deter healthier Americans—whose participation is crucial if the exchanges are to work properly—from enrolling.
Work on HealthCare.gov was continuing over the weekend. Julie Bataille, spokesperson for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, issued a statement saying the site was “performing well” on Saturday “with low overall error rates and response times despite heavier than usual weekend traffic.”
“We are making additional hardware upgrades and software fixes [Saturday night] as part of a planned set of improvements to improve speed and reduce errors,” she added.
But the exchanges aren’t out of the woods yet, and there are signs that the administration expects to see more bumps in the road.
For one thing, the rate of signups needs to pick up dramatically. Insurers have said that in order for the marketplace to work, 7 million people will need to sign up. At the current pace, just 1.1 million would do so by March through the federal exchanges, which cover two thirds of the population, according to the Times.
The White House said earlier this month that the goal was to have 80% of the site’s users complete the process by enrolling in a plan. But asked this week whether the administration was tracking that number and would release it, Jeff Zients, who is managing the website repair project, was evasive. “We will continue to update you on metrics and user experience and our success rates as we go forward,” he said.
In another indicator that there is still less than total confidence in HealthCare.gov’s functionality, the administration has asked health-care advocacy groups that are helping people to enroll not to send a flood of applicants to the site next week. Instead, officials are requesting a more gradual approach.
And the administration announced last week that it would extend to Dec. 23 the deadline for people to sign up for plans that start on the first of the year, a concession to the difficulties that many users have had accessing the site. The administration has also delayed the online marketplace for small businesses by one year.
Still, there is plenty of good news emerging amid the law’s rollout. The state-based exchanges are running smoothly and racking up solid numbers of enrollees—proof, supporters say, of the huge demand for affordable coverage, and of the law’s workability when state officials are cooperative. Kentucky’s exchange has emerged as the model, but California’s and New York’s are also success stories.
Ahead of the weekend deadline, the president sounded a confident note about the law’s long-term prospects.
“I continue to believe, and [I am] absolutely convinced, that at the end of the day, people are going to look back at the work we’ve done to make sure that in this country you don’t go bankrupt when you get sick, that families have that security,” Obama said in an interview Friday. “That is going be a legacy I am extraordinarily proud of.”
Secretary of State Kathleen Sebelius has echoed that optimism. “We are definitely on track to have a significantly different user experience by the end of this month,” she said in a conference call with state and local officials Tuesday. Still, in a blog post Friday at The Huffington Post, Sebelius urged users to visit during “off-peak hours”—an apparent effort to avoid overloading the site.
The law also appears to be succeeding in another key area: holding down health care costs. Since 2010, when Obamacare was passed, health spending has risen less than one-third as fast as its long-term average, after being adjusted for inflation, according to a White House report released this month. And there’s reason to believe the health care law has played a key role, in part through a provision that reduces Medicare overpayments.
It’s enough to make some Affordable Care Act supporters sound positively giddy.
“You won’t hear much about this good news until and unless the Obamacare website gets fixed,” economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote Friday. “But under the surface, health reform is starting to look like a bigger success than even its most ardent advocates expected.”
The Obama administration is about to reach its self-imposed deadline to fix HealthCare.gov by the end of the month, and the White House appears set to claim victory – at least a partial one.
The administration is expected to announce Sunday that the site will be functional for the vast majority of users. In other words, the public will be able to use a website that allows applicants to find subsidies they qualify for, compare private plans, and, ultimately, enroll.
There is still plenty of work to be done, and key questions about the site’s performance won’t be answered until traffic ramps up in the coming weeks. But 60 days since the health care exchanges debuted, the sense of crisis surrounding the Affordable Care Act (ACA)—driven by the twin challenges of a dysfunctional website and a flood of cancellation notices sent by insurers—is waning.
After weeks of intense work by a team of outside consultants on leave from Google and other major tech firms, the site’s capacity has been doubled to handle 50,000 simultaneous users, or up to 800,000 per day, the administration said this week.
That has already led to a boost in signups. Between Sunday and Tuesday, nearly 20,000 people—the most for a three-day period—successfully enrolled in the federal online exchanges, according to the New York Times. During the entire month of October, just 27,000 did so. The site has also seen major performance enhancements since its launch in October.
President Obama has said fixing the site is just one piece of improving the signup process. “Part of what we’re realizing is that they are going to be a certain portion of people who are just going to need more help and more handholding in the application process,” he told reporters earlier this month. “And so I guess part of the continuous improvement that I’m looking at is not just a technical issue. It’s also, can we streamline the application process? What are we doing to give people more assistance in the application process? How do the call centers and the people who are helping folks in-person – how are they trained so that things can go more smoothly?”
Making it easier to sign up has emerged as the most pressing issue concerning the health care law. If it remains difficult, that could deter healthier Americans—whose participation is crucial if the exchanges are to work properly—from enrolling.
Work on HealthCare.gov was continuing over the weekend. Julie Bataille, spokesperson for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, issued a statement saying the site was “performing well” on Saturday “with low overall error rates and response times despite heavier than usual weekend traffic.”
“We are making additional hardware upgrades and software fixes [Saturday night] as part of a planned set of improvements to improve speed and reduce errors,” she added.
But the exchanges aren’t out of the woods yet, and there are signs that the administration expects to see more bumps in the road.
For one thing, the rate of signups needs to pick up dramatically. Insurers have said that in order for the marketplace to work, 7 million people will need to sign up. At the current pace, just 1.1 million would do so by March through the federal exchanges, which cover two thirds of the population, according to the Times.
The White House said earlier this month that the goal was to have 80% of the site’s users complete the process by enrolling in a plan. But asked this week whether the administration was tracking that number and would release it, Jeff Zients, who is managing the website repair project, was evasive. “We will continue to update you on metrics and user experience and our success rates as we go forward,” he said.
In another indicator that there is still less than total confidence in HealthCare.gov’s functionality, the administration has asked health-care advocacy groups that are helping people to enroll not to send a flood of applicants to the site next week. Instead, officials are requesting a more gradual approach.
And the administration announced last week that it would extend to Dec. 23 the deadline for people to sign up for plans that start on the first of the year, a concession to the difficulties that many users have had accessing the site. The administration has also delayed the online marketplace for small businesses by one year.
Still, there is plenty of good news emerging amid the law’s rollout. The state-based exchanges are running smoothly and racking up solid numbers of enrollees—proof, supporters say, of the huge demand for affordable coverage, and of the law’s workability when state officials are cooperative. Kentucky’s exchange has emerged as the model, but California’s and New York’s are also success stories.
Ahead of the weekend deadline, the president sounded a confident note about the law’s long-term prospects.
“I continue to believe, and [I am] absolutely convinced, that at the end of the day, people are going to look back at the work we’ve done to make sure that in this country you don’t go bankrupt when you get sick, that families have that security,” Obama said in an interview Friday. “That is going be a legacy I am extraordinarily proud of.”
Secretary of State Kathleen Sebelius has echoed that optimism. “We are definitely on track to have a significantly different user experience by the end of this month,” she said in a conference call with state and local officials Tuesday. Still, in a blog post Friday at The Huffington Post, Sebelius urged users to visit during “off-peak hours”—an apparent effort to avoid overloading the site.
The law also appears to be succeeding in another key area: holding down health care costs. Since 2010, when Obamacare was passed, health spending has risen less than one-third as fast as its long-term average, after being adjusted for inflation, according to a White House report released this month. And there’s reason to believe the health care law has played a key role, in part through a provision that reduces Medicare overpayments.
It’s enough to make some Affordable Care Act supporters sound positively giddy.
“You won’t hear much about this good news until and unless the Obamacare website gets fixed,” economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote Friday. “But under the surface, health reform is starting to look like a bigger success than even its most ardent advocates expected.”
http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/debugged-obamacare-site-handles-heavy-traffic
"NBC News reported 100,000 Americans successfully purchased coverage through the federal exchange website during the month of November. That’s up significantly from October, when only an estimated 27,000 enrolled.
A mad dash of sign-ups could come in the next three weeks, as consumers have until Dec. 23 to get signed up for coverage that starts January 1, 2014. Enrollment will continue through March, but the coverage for those people would start later."
"NBC News reported 100,000 Americans successfully purchased coverage through the federal exchange website during the month of November. That’s up significantly from October, when only an estimated 27,000 enrolled.
A mad dash of sign-ups could come in the next three weeks, as consumers have until Dec. 23 to get signed up for coverage that starts January 1, 2014. Enrollment will continue through March, but the coverage for those people would start later."
I'd agree that it is unprecedented. Numerous reasons as well.
Yea I kinda agree with that! but you've gotta admit, the dysfunction in his Presidency is Unprecedented..
Absolutely not with that be the end of the dysfunction. The system will continue until we fix the system. This has nothing to do with Obama. If a republican gets into office, the disdain from the left will begin and the cycle will run the other way.
Its repetitive.
Its repetitive.
All will be well with Health care and people getting covered..As for the dysfunctional government, that won't change until President Obama is out of office...Once he is out, then the right will play nice with whomever else takes office..Sad, but true...
I don't think it will be well as long as our government is so dysfunctional. The dysfunction is nothing new.... we keep going further and further in the hole. That doesn't sound well.
All WILL be well....
I wish it were as simple as "positive thought". And I guess you would rate something either positive or negative on how it affects you. For every positive outcome, I've heard a negative outcome. 50/50 is pretty miserable if you ask me.
If I were to lose my employer paid insurance, I'd be screwed, blued and tattooed. No way could I afford insurance at these proposed rates compared to the coverage I currently get. I don't want to sound selfish, but that is a big old negative for me.
This is going to sound negative too but I think our government is satisfied (and has been for a long time) with half thought programs and policies. I am getting worn out on having government officials look me in the eye and tell me something is going to be good for me while they are trying to rape me at the same time.
If I were to lose my employer paid insurance, I'd be screwed, blued and tattooed. No way could I afford insurance at these proposed rates compared to the coverage I currently get. I don't want to sound selfish, but that is a big old negative for me.
This is going to sound negative too but I think our government is satisfied (and has been for a long time) with half thought programs and policies. I am getting worn out on having government officials look me in the eye and tell me something is going to be good for me while they are trying to rape me at the same time.
“If we want it to work, it will, if not, it wont. That simple I think.”
I have to disagree with you on this one. I don’t think even the Mystical Power of Positive Thinking or Mind Over Matter is going to be the Key to it’s success. It may take some of the heat off of them but will attribute little to making it work.
I have to disagree with you on this one. I don’t think even the Mystical Power of Positive Thinking or Mind Over Matter is going to be the Key to it’s success. It may take some of the heat off of them but will attribute little to making it work.
I guess I should point out that the website that is malfunctioning in florida is an unemployment website.
There is a website here in florida where people go to sign up, report, in order to recieve their checks. Guess what! It too has been malfunctioning for over a year, and people are not getting their checks.. Our dear govs response to the uproar? We have the best people working on it......And this is only a state website, just imagine how much more convuluted a national one is. Medicaid and SS were slow out of the gate, so was medicare part D, and in Ma, where Romeny instituted his website? Yep, glitches there as well to the point of only having about 100 sign up in the first month, now 98 percent of them are covered.
Just sayin. You can hope for it to work, or you can hope for it to fail. Depends on who you listen to. If we want it to work, it will, if not, it wont. That simple I think.
Just sayin. You can hope for it to work, or you can hope for it to fail. Depends on who you listen to. If we want it to work, it will, if not, it wont. That simple I think.
I wouldn't hold my breath on that. Eventually can be a real long time. I'm sorry about being pessimistic about it all, but man.... The thing got out of the gates all wrong, people still don't understand whats happening, clarity on funding is non-existent, we were lied too about being able to keep policies. Its hard for people to celebrate that stuff.
I'm almost of the opinion that it can only get better from here, but I thought that before about the ACA....
I'm almost of the opinion that it can only get better from here, but I thought that before about the ACA....
The ACA should and will be celebrated.....Eventually...
Sounds like a real nice way to say, "were working on it, but go ahead and celebrate".
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