World News Korner

Healthcare.gov meets November 30th deadline. Not yet perfect, but much better.

Courtesy of USA Today:

Healthcare.gov has doubled its user capacity and eliminated many bugs in time for today's deadline, when the Obama administration pledged the problematic website would operate smoothly "for the vast majority" of people trying to access the site.

Jeffrey Zients, who is leading a technical team charged with fixing the website after its disastrous Oct. 1 rollout, said capacity is being increased to 50,000 simultaneous users and more than 800,000 total consumer visits a day.

That would allow about 1.84 million people to "comfortably" sign up for health insurance coverage through the federal exchange by Dec. 23, or in time for Jan. 1 coverage, he said at a White House briefing. Potentially more than 9.5 million people could sign up before March 31, or the end of the 2014 enrollment period.

"That said, there could be moments in the middle of the day — seems to be the peak — where capacity goes beyond that current user level, at which point there will be a customer-friendly queuing system which would notify you when to come back to the site and sort of be first in line," Zients said. In other words, people will receive an e-mail letting them know when to return to the page.

There are still some glitches, but the improvements are impressive and mean that the time left for Republicans to use the website as an example of Obamacare's failure is almost up.

Once this piece is in place, and functioning appropriately, it should not take long for more stories about successful signups, and reduced premiums, will start filtering in and will soon outweigh those about cancelled policies.

The important thing is for all of this to get squared away before the 2014 election cycle. It would be immensely helpful if the Democrats could run on the success of the ACA rather than feel they have to run away from it.

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