Healthcare website improved, say US officials

Yesterday, two months after the disastrous launch of a website that is a key component of US president Barack Obama’s healthcare law, administration officials said they had met their goal of getting the HealthCare.gov site running smoothly but warned it needs more fixes.

Mr Obama's adviser Jeffrey Zients said a five-week emergency "tech surge" had doubled the capacity of the online health insurance portal that is crucial to helping millions of people shop for insurance plans, while making it more responsive and less prone to errors.

The administration said the effort’s key improvement was to increase HealthCare.gov’s capacity to 50,000 simultaneous users, which would allow the site to handle a minimum of 800,000 users per day.

But Mr Zients also warned that peak traffic volumes in the coming weeks could eclipse the new capacity as consumers rush to sign up before a December 23rd deadline for coverage that begins on January 1st. That could delay some people from completing online applications for subsidised health coverage.

Officials also acknowledged that the site may still not operate smoothly for some visitors, even when traffic volumes are within its capabilities.

'Open for business'
Even so, officials said, the site is dramatically better than when it was launched on October 1st. It was overwhelmed by users in a debacle that embarrassed Mr Obama, fuelled Republican complaints about the Democratic president's healthcare overhaul, and threatened to make his signature domestic achievement a drag on Democrats heading into the 2014 elections, when control of Congress will be up for grabs.

“We’ve widened the system’s on-ramp – it now has four lanes instead of one or two,” said Mr Zients. “We have a much more stable system that is reliably open for business.”

The Zients team’s success could mark a more upbeat chapter for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which also is known as Obamacare and is designed to help provide coverage to millions of uninsured and under-insured Americans.

If HealthCare.gov remains stable enough to handle millions of applications for insurance and for government subsidies to help lower-income people pay for coverage, it will help tamp down a major crisis of Mr Obama’s administration.

An improved website won’t solve all of Obamacare’s problems, however. There are many questions on whether the programme will be able to enrol the estimated seven million people it needs by the end of March, including millions of healthy, young enrolees who are needed to keep the programme’s costs in check.

"The issue is really the management capacity of the Obama administration," said Robert Blendon, a Harvard University expert on healthcare policy and public opinion. "If the website really is still working a week from now, it'll make people feel that at least they have the capacity to turn things around and move ahead."

But a repeat of problems that plagued the site’s launch could leave hundreds of thousands without coverage and deal a staggering blow to Mr Obama’s legacy and the 2014 election prospects of congressional Democrats, already on the defensive over the programme’s recent problems.

Republicans were quick yesterday to say the administration overstated gains on the website. "Have they made some progress? Yes. They brought in some private-sector folks to try to get the functionality up," representative Mike Rogers of Michigan said on NBC's Meet the Press. But, he said, "It still doesn't function right." – (Reuters)