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| Alex Gonzalez, left, a volunteer with Enroll America, a private, non-profit organization running a grassroots campaign to encourage people to sign up for health care offered by the Affordable Care Act, trains volunteers who work the phones to inform residents of their health care options, Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2013, in Tampa, Fla. After months of build-up, Florida residents can start shopping for health insurance on government-run online marketplaces as the key component of the Affordable Care Act goes live. |
CHICAGO (AP)
-- Americans got their first chance Tuesday to shop for health insurance
using the online marketplaces that are at the heart of President Barack
Obama's health care overhaul, but government websites designed to sell
the policies struggled to handle the traffic, with many frustrated users
reporting trouble setting up accounts.
State
and federal agencies were working to fix the sites, which represent the
biggest expansion in coverage in nearly 50 years. There should be time
to make improvements. The open-enrollment period lasts for six months.
Administration
officials said they are pleased with the strong consumer interest, but
on a day of glitches they refused to say how many people actually
succeeded in signing up for coverage. They gave inconsistent answers on
whether a common problem had been cleared up or was still being
corrected.
By Tuesday afternoon, at least 2.8
million people had visited the healthcare.gov website, said Medicare
administrator Marilyn Tavenner, whose office is overseeing the rollout
of the Affordable Care Act. The website had seven times the number of
simultaneous users ever recorded on the medicare.gov site.
In
Obama's home state, dozens of people who came to a Champaign, Ill.,
public health office to sign up for coverage found computer screens
around the room flashing an error message: "System is unavailable."
Kimberly
Shockley - logging in from Houston, Texas - and Mike Weaver, who lives
in rural southern Illinois, ran into the same glitch as many others:
They could not get past the security questions while trying to set up
their personal accounts through healthcare.gov.
"I'm
frustrated, very frustrated," said Shockley, a self-employed CPA. She
spent more than an hour trying to get the security questions to work
without success. When she clicked on a drop-down menu of suggested
security questions, none appeared. She then tried to create her own
questions, but that didn't work either.
Weaver,
a self-employed photographer, said he also ran into problems with the
drop-down menus. And when they started working, he still wasn't able to
set up his account.
"The first day of
something that you know is going to have a lot of bugs, it's not that
frustrating," he said. "If it was the last day to sign up ... then I'd
be terribly frustrated."
Shockley has health insurance, but is looking for a better plan. Weaver is uninsured.
State-operated sites also experienced trouble.
Minnesota
got its site running after a delay of several hours. Rhode Island's
site recovered after a temporary crash. A spokesman for the New York
Department of Health blamed difficulties on the 2 million visits to the
website in the first 90 minutes after its launch. Washington state's
marketplace used Twitter to thank users for their patience.
Exchange
officials in Colorado said their website would not be fully functional
for the first month, although consumers will be able to get help
applying for government subsidies during that time. Hawaii's marketplace
wasn't allowing people to compare plans and prices.
Connecticut
seemed to be a bright spot, although some users reported some snags.
Access Health CT sent out a tweet shortly before noon Tuesday,
confirming the marketplace logged 10,000 visitors in the first three
hours of operation and 22 enrollments. A family of three was the first
to sign up for coverage.
California, home to
15 percent of the nation's uninsured, reported delays online and on the
phone because of heavy volume. The first completed health insurance
application was taken at 8:04 a.m., just minutes after the exchange
opened.
In Portsmouth, N.H., Deborah Lielasus
tried to sign up for coverage but got only as far as creating an account
before the website stopped working. She said she expected problems.
Lielasus,
a 54-year-old self-employed grant writer, currently spends about $8,500
a year in premiums and more than $10,000 for out-of-pocket expenses
because she has a health condition and her only option has been a state
high-risk insurance pool. She said she expects those costs to decrease
significantly.
As excited as she was to sign
up, she said, her anticipation was tempered by dismay over the
government shutdown that was led by congressional Republicans who want
to block the health insurance reforms.
"I'm
really happy that this is happening, that this is being launched ... I
feel like it's a child caught in the middle of a really bad divorce,"
Lielasus said.
The shutdown will have no
immediate effect on the insurance marketplaces that are the backbone of
the law, because they operate with money that isn't subject to the
annual budget wrangling in Washington.
The
marketplaces represent a turning point in the nation's approach to
health care. The Obama administration hopes to sign up 7 million people
during the first year and aims to eventually sign up at least half of
the nearly 50 million uninsured Americans through an expansion of
Medicaid or government-subsidized plans.
But
if people become frustrated with the malfunctions in the computer-based
enrollment process and turn away from the program, the prospects for
Obama's signature domestic-policy achievement could dim.
"You've
got to launch this thing right the first time," said Robert Laszewski, a
consultant who worked 20 years in the insurance industry. "If you
don't, financially you will never recover."
Neera
Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, which helped
work for passage of the law, cautioned against rushing to judge on
first-day performance. Numerous observers had predicted bugs and
setbacks. Trained outreach workers in many states are having trouble
getting the certification they need to start helping people to enroll.
In
Texas, a federally funded network of "navigators" hired to help people
enroll was off to a rocky start because of backtracking participants -
including some cowed by the politics of the health law.
At
least four regional government councils - covering more than 30
counties statewide - reversed course in the past two weeks and turned
away funds that would train navigators in their areas. Local leaders
described their hesitancy as a mix of uncertainty surrounding state
rules and a fear of running afoul of Republican leaders.
Many
states predicted that an initial surge of interest would test the
online system, but they expect most people to sign up closer to Dec. 15,
which is the deadline for coverage to start Jan. 1. Customers have
until the end of March to sign up in order to avoid tax penalties.
Under
the law, health insurance companies can no longer deny coverage to
someone with a pre-existing medical condition and cannot impose lifetime
caps on coverage. They also must cover a list of essential services,
ranging from mental health treatment to maternity care.
