World News Korner

Healthcare.gov meets deadline. Republicans meet square one.

Courtesy of USA Today:

The White House announced Sunday it has met its goal to make the Healthcare.gov website operate smoothly for most users by Nov. 30.

"The bottom line is health care.gov on December first is night and day from where it was October first," said Jeffrey Zients, the president's appointee to fix the website's problems. "The site is now stable and operating at its intended capacity at greatly improved performance."

When the site -- which allows people to compare private plan benefits and costs before buying an insurance policy -- launched Oct. 1, millions of people were disappointed by slow or frozen pages, an inability to log in, and incorrect or missing information. The White House tapped Zients to lead a team to fix the site.

At the beginning of November, Zients said the site had an "up time" of just 43%. As of Nov. 30, the site's up time was 95%.

"We have a much more stable system that's reliably open for business," he said in a Sunday conference call with reporters.

After hardware updates and bug fixes that continued through the weekend, the federal health exchange site now has the capacity to serve 50,000 people at a time, for a total of 800,000 people a day, according to a report issued Sunday by the Department of Health and Human Services.

That figure is "conservative," Zients said, because they figured it using an eight-hour day, rather than a 24-hour day.

According to the administration, Zients' repair team has so far:

• Made hundreds of software fixes, upgraded hardware, and monitored the system to make improvements;
• Stabilized the site at its original intended capacity; and
• Improved overall metrics, which means the site is working well for most users.

A new hardware upgrade made Friday quadrupled the registration capacity, Zients said, and response times are under one second with an error rate below 1%.

Over the holiday weekend, "Traffic has been significantly higher than a typical weekend," Zients said, but the website has handled the traffic smoothly.

Okay well, using Right Wing logic, if the fact that the website was NOT working effectively before meant that Obamacare was an abject failure, then doesn't the fact that it IS working now mean......

Now let the Republican scramble for new talking points begin!

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