Obamacare
website back up ahead of schedule after maintenance
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[December 16, 2013]
NEW YORK (Reuters) — The troubled
federal website used by Americans to shop for health insurance as part
of President Barack Obama's healthcare overhaul was back up and running
on Sunday after planned maintenance overnight took less time than
planned, government officials said.
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Healthcare.gov underwent what officials at the Centers for
Medicare & Medicaid Services, the agency running the healthcare
overhaul, called "extended maintenance" beginning at midnight
Saturday EST. The work was scheduled to last through approximately
noon on Sunday, during which time people in the 36 states served by
HealthCare.gov could not fill out applications or enroll in a health
insurance plan.
The site was instead up and running at 8:30 a.m. on Sunday morning,
CMS said in a statement.
The downtime affected not only customers in the 36 states but also
those in the 14 states and District of Columbia running their own
insurance marketplaces.
In addition to the marketplace where people shop for and enroll in a
health plans, the federal data services hub was unavailable. The hub
determines whether people are eligible for subsidies to defray the
cost of insurance, regardless of what state they live in.
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Since its disastrous rollout on October 1, HealthCare.gov has
undergone both planned and unplanned downtime and outages as
contractors have scrambled to repair the botched software. Since
late November, it has functioned much more smoothly.
(Reporting by Sharon Begley; editing by Bill Trott)
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