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 The Obama administration had promised a vastly improved shopping
experience on healthcare.gov by the end of November, and Monday was
the first business day since the date passed.
Brokers and online assisters in Utah say three of every four people
successfully signed up for health coverage on the online within an
hour of logging in. A state official overseeing North Dakota's
navigators said he had noticed improvements in the site, as did
organizations helping people sign up in parts of Alabama and
Wisconsin.
But staffers at an organization in South Florida and a hospital
group with locations in Iowa and Illinois said they have seen no
major improvements from the federal website, which 36 states are
relying on.
Amanda Crowell, director of revenue cycle for UnityPoint
Health-Trinity, which has four hospitals in Iowa and Illinois, said
the organization's 15 enrollment counselors did not see a marked
improvement on the site.
"We had very high hopes for today, but those hopes were very much
quashed," said Crowell. She said out of a dozen attempts online only
one person was able to get to the point of plan selection, though
the person decided to wait.
The site appeared to generally run smoothly early Monday morning
before glitches began slowing people down. By 10 a.m., federal
health officials deployed a new queue system that stalls new
visitors on a waiting page so that those further along in the
process can finish their application with fewer problems.
About 750,000 had visited the site by Monday night — about double
the traffic for a typical Monday, according to figures from the
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Roberta Vann, a certified application counselor at the Hamilton
Health Center, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, said the site worked
well for her Monday morning but she became frustrated later when the
site went down.
"You can get to a point, but it does not allow you to select any
plans, you can't get eligibility (information). It stops there," she
said. "The thought of it working as well as it was didn't last
long."
In South Florida, John Foley and his team of navigators were only
able to successfully enroll one of a handful of return applicants
who came to their office before glitches started, including wonky
estimates for subsidy eligibility. He worried about how they would
fare with the roughly 50 other appointments scheduled later in the
week.
Although frustrated, most were not deterred, he said.
"These are people that have policies going away, who have health
problems. These are people that are going to be very persistent,"
said Foley, an attorney and certified counselor for Legal Aid
Society of Palm Beach County.
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Despite the Obama administration's team of technicians working
around the clock, it's not clear if the site will be able to handle
the surge of applicants expected by the Dec. 23 deadline to enroll
for coverage starting at the beginning of the year. Many navigators
also say they're concerned the bad publicity plaguing the troubled
website will prevent people from giving the system another try.
"There's a trust level that we feel like we broke with them. We told
them we were here to help them and we can't help them," said Valerie
Spencer, an enrollment counselor at Sarah Bush Lincoln Center, a
small regional hospital in the central Illinois city of Mattoon.
Federal health officials acknowledged the website is still a work in
progress. They've also acknowledged the importance of fixing
back-end problems as insurers struggle to process applications
because of incomplete or inaccurate data. Even when consumers think
they've gone through the whole process, their information may not
get to the insurer without problems.
"We do know that things are not perfect with the site. We will
continue to make improvements and upgrades," said Julie Bataille,
communications director for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Services.
In less than an hour Monday, Starla Redmon, 58, of Paris, Ill., was
able to successfully get into a health plan with help from an
enrollment counselor. Redmon, who juggles two part-time jobs and has
been uninsured for four years, said she was surprised the website
worked so well after hearing reports about its problems.
"Everything she typed in, it went through," said Redmon, who chose a
bronze plan and will pay about $75 a month after a tax credit. "It
was the cheapest plan I could go with."
[Associated
Press; KELLI KENNEDY, Associated Press]
Contributing to this
report were Associated Press writers Carla K. Johnson in Chicago;
Chris Tomlinson in Austin, Texas; Catherine Lucey in Des Moines,
Iowa; Peter Jackson in Harrisburg, Pa.; Scott Bauer in Madison,
Wis.; James MacPherson in Bismarck, N.D.; Brady McCombs in Salt Lake
City; and Phillip Rawls in Montgomery, Ala.
Follow Kelli Kennedy on
Twitter at
http://twitter.com/kkennedyAP.
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