White House: Deadline for website will be met

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

The Obama administration says it will meet its self-imposed deadline of fixing the troubled health care website so that 50,000 people can log in at the same time starting late Saturday. Yet questions remain about the stability of the site, the volume of traffic it can handle and the quality of the data it is delivering to insurers.

Round-the-clock repair work since HealthCare.gov went live Oct. 1 has produced fewer errors, and pages are loading faster.

But the site still won’t be able to do everything the administration wanted, and companion sites for small businesses and Spanish speakers have been delayed.

Still, the White House hopes a website that is at least operating more smoothly after weeks of bad publicity about its troubles will mark a fresh start for Obama and the signature domestic initiative of his presidency.

Administration officials said HealthCare.gov was working well Saturday, the deadline set to have it working smoothly for the “vast majority of users,” after overnight hardware upgrades to boost its capacity. Software fixes to further improve speed and reduce errors were planned for overnight Saturday during the long holiday weekend, presumably a time when traffic to the health care website would be low.

Additional data on the website’s progress was to be released today by Jeff Zients, the website’s chief troubleshooter.

Obama has promised that HealthCare.gov “will work much better on Nov. 30, Dec. 1 than it worked certainly on Oct. 1.” But, in trying to lower expectations, he said he could not guarantee that “100 percent of the people 100 percent of the time going on this website will have a perfectly seamless, smooth experience.”

The nation’s largest health insurer trade group said significant problems remain.

Karen Ignagni, president and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans, said insurers have complained that enrollment data sent to them from the website include too much incorrect, duplicative, garbled or missing information. She said the problems must be cleared up to guarantee consumers the coverage they signed up for effective Jan. 1.