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 A combination of software fixes, design changes, added hardware
and newly announced wiggle room should provide the right combination
to finally deliver a workable website, White House troubleshooter
Jeffrey Zients said in an upbeat assessment. Zients is a management
consultant parachuted in by the White House to extricate President
Barack Obama from a technology debacle that has sent his poll
ratings into a nosedive.
"We think this gives us the capacity we need to reach everybody we
need to reach across this period of time," said Zients.
The added leeway comes in the form of an extra eight days this year
for consumers nationwide to sign up and still get insurance by Jan.
1. A previous Dec. 15 deadline was stretched to Dec. 23.
Policyholders must pay their premiums by Dec. 31.
More time could prevent some people from having a break in coverage
on account of the balky enrollment website. That's critical for
those losing current individual policies that don't measure up under
the law, and also for high-risk patients in a small federal
insurance program that ends this year.
For the insurance industry, the announcement only complicated the
balancing act. Every week a new edict from the administration sends
the companies scrambling. More time for consumers means less time
for insurers to verify enrollments and correct errors.
"It makes it more challenging to process enrollments in time for
coverage to begin on Jan. 1," said Robert Zirkelbach, of the trade
group America's Health Insurance Plans. "Ultimately it will depend
on how many people enroll in those last few days." He underscored
that consumers also need to pay their premiums on time.
Other deadlines could also slip. Asked if open enrollment would be
extended beyond Mar. 31, 2014, administration spokeswoman Julie
Bataille hedged, "not at this point." Bataille is communications
director for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which
is also in charge of administering Obama's health care law.
The Affordable Care Act covers the uninsured through a combination
of subsidized private plans and expanded Medicaid. Consumers were
supposed to be able to apply and enroll online. But the federal
HealthCare.gov website serving 36 states froze up the very day it
launched, and several states running their own sites have also
experienced technology troubles. Fewer than 27,000 people were able
to sign up during October in the federally-administered states, and
another 79,000 in state-run programs.
Zients had set a Nov. 30 goal to have the federal site "working
smoothly for the vast majority of users." He now says work will
continue beyond that, but the website is far improved.
"There will not be a magic moment around the end of the month when
our work will be complete," he said. There was one significant
outage this week, lasting several hours on Wednesday.
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The site is now able to handle about 25,000 users at the same time.
Zients said upgrades during downtime this weekend will put it on
track to handle 50,000 simultaneous users, close to the level
originally envisioned. It translates to about 800,000 visits a day.
On top of that, technicians are putting a system in place to handle
spikes in demand. Consumers will get an email telling them when they
can come back.
Overall, the site is faster, more reliable and easier to navigate,
said Zients.
Separately, the administration also announced a schedule change in
next year's open enrollment season. It will start on Nov. 15, 2014,
a month later than originally scheduled, and finish on Jan. 15,
2015, about five weeks later than originally scheduled. The midterm
congressional elections are Nov. 4, and congressional Republicans
accused the administration of shifting the dates for political
reasons, to hide a spike in 2015 premiums.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, called it a "cynical political move"
that means "if premiums go through the roof in the first year of
Obamacare, no one will know about it until after the election."
But if next year follows the same pattern as this year, there should
be plenty of information available about 2015 premiums before the
election. This year 17 states and Washington, D.C., posted the data
publicly ahead of the administration. "We'll definitely start seeing
some premiums earlier from state insurance departments," said Larry
Levitt of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.
The administration says the change is to allow insurers more time to
prepare and submit premiums.
However, there is one possible way that Democrats could benefit
politically. If lighting strikes twice and the website sputters
again during the next open enrollment season, that second act would
not take place until after the voting is done.
[Associated
Press; RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR]
Copyright 2013 The Associated
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