Health care site put to the test as deadline nears
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| Lisa Donlea, 41, of Irvine, Calif., holds her breath and hopes the Covered California enrollment site will go to the next step, Monday, Dec. 23, 2013, in Laguna, Calif. It did after 12 minutes. The federal health insurance exchange enrollment took nearly two hours for Donlea and a counselor to complete due to the website's slowness. |
CHICAGO (AP)
-- The government's retooled health care website was put to its biggest
test yet as record numbers of Americans rushed to beat Tuesday's
extended deadline for signing up for insurance.
After
a disastrous, glitch-filled rollout in October, HealthCare.gov, where
people in 36 states can shop for coverage, received 2 million visits
Monday, its highest one-day total, the government said.
Traffic
was not as heavy on Tuesday but still high, White House spokeswoman
Tara McGuinness said. She had no immediate estimate of visitors or how
many succeeded in obtaining insurance.
"The
site is performing well under intense consumer traffic," said Kurt
DelBene, a former Microsoft executive appointed last week to take over
management of the online marketplace. "With the highest volumes we have
seen to date, response time is fast and the error rating is low."
Error rates were lower than 1 in 200, and pages loaded quickly, in less than a half-second, officials said.
For
a multitude of reasons, including technical difficulties with the site
or trouble understanding the instructions, thousands of people sought
telephone help and wound up waiting on hold on Christmas Eve at the
government's call center.
Ian Stewart of Salt
Lake City said he and his wife, both students, had been trying for weeks
to complete their application on the federal site, thwarted by computer
error messages each time.
On Tuesday morning,
while visiting relatives in Colorado for Christmas, they reached a call
center counselor who succeeded in enrolling them. The "silver" plan
they chose will cost them $241 a month after a cost-lowering tax credit.
"We're
relieved that we got it working, elated that we got insurance again and
very frustrated that it took this long," Stewart said.
More
than 110,000 people had called the government's help line by Tuesday
afternoon, with wait times averaging 27 minutes, officials said. On
Monday, the call center received more than 250,000 calls, a one-day
record.
Monday was the sign-up deadline for
people wanting coverage at the start of the new year. But the Obama
administration pushed back the deadline a day to deal with heavy traffic
from procrastinators.
"We see this intense
traffic as a sign that people are eager for affordable health
insurance," said Julie Bataille, a spokeswoman for the Centers for
Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency in charge of the
overhaul.
After the one-day grace period was
announced, critics of President Barack Obama's signature program seized
on the latest in a string of delays and reversals as more evidence that
the overhaul is in trouble.
"The amazing,
ever-expanding deadline? It's clearly a sign of desperation by the
administration to do everything they can to increase the number of
people signing up," said health economist Gail Wilensky, who ran
Medicare for President George H.W. Bush.
The website went through extensive hardware and software upgrades to make it more reliable and increase its capacity.
When
the number of simultaneous users reached 60,000 on Monday, site
operators employed a queuing system that allows people to either wait or
give an email address to be invited back later, the government said.
More than 129,000 users gave their email.
On Tuesday, traffic wasn't heavy enough to trigger the system, McGuinness said in the afternoon.
Many states operate their own online marketplaces for buying coverage, and some of them also extended their deadlines.
The
insurance industry, too, has pushed back deadlines for payment, with
most health plans allowing customers to pay by Jan. 10 and still get
coverage retroactive to Jan. 1.
"With
deadlines that keep changing, insurers want to alleviate confusion,"
said Robert Zirkelbach, spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans.
"Health plans are going to do everything they can to help consumers with
the enrollment process."
Obama said late last week that more than 1 million Americans had enrolled for coverage since Oct. 1.
The
administration's estimates call for 3.3 million to sign up by Dec. 31,
and the target is 7 million by the end of March. After that, people who
fail to buy coverage can face tax penalties.
