Google – AFP, 1 December 2013
 |
Cathey Park
shows her bandaged hand written "I love Obamacare" as she waits
to
hear Barack Obama speak on healtcare at the Faneuil Hall in Boston,
Massachusetts,
on October 30, 2013 (AFP, Jewel Samad)
|
Washington
— The troubleshooter appointed by President Barack Obama to overhaul a bungled
health care website rollout said Sunday that improvements had made a
"night and day" difference in handling online traffic.
The White
House has admitted previously that the launch of Healthcare.gov, where people
can sign up for health insurance, was a debacle and the Obama administration
pledged that the vast majority of potential customers would be able to enroll
online by the end of November.
Jeffrey
Zients, an Obama advisor recently given the job of finding fixes to end the
website woes and get the president's signature policy achievement back on
track, said technical problems were being overcome.
"The
site now has the capacity to handle 50,000 concurrent or simultaneous users at
one time ... so the site will support more than 800,000 consumer visits a
day," he said during a conference call with reporters.
 |
An
Affordable Healthcare Act supporter
(right) talks with a student on the campus
of Santa Monica City College in Santa
Monica, California on October 10, 2013
(AFP, Robyn Beck)
|
Additionally,
the website is up and running successfully more than 90 percent of the time --
up from an estimated 42.9 percent through most of October, when people
routinely experienced delays or could not gain online access at all.
"The
bottom line: Healthcare.gov on December 1 is night-and-day from where it was on
October 1," Zients said, citing improvements that include a technical
support center monitoring the website 24 hours a day.
Some 400
bugs that were harming the website's operation have been eliminated, he said,
though he did not provide data on how many people were signing up for
insurance.
"We
developed a prioritized punch-list of software fixes, hardware upgrades and
user enhancements with the prioritization based on what has the biggest impact
on system stability, capacity, speed and user experience," Zients added.
Julie
Bataille, communications director for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Services said during the call with reporters that 80 percent of users are now
able to apply for health insurance successfully on the site.
Healthcare.gov's
rollout on October 1 sent Obama's approval rating tanking and pushed some of
his fellow Democrats into open revolt, while sparking an opening for gleeful
Republicans opposed to healthcare reform.
Only
approximately 27,000 people were able to subscribe for insurance via
Healthcare.gov in October, according to official figures.
 |
Barack
Obama speaks about his healthcare
reform laws, known as Obamacare, at an
Organizing for Action event in Washington,
DC, November 4, 2013 (AFP, Saul
Loeb)
|
On the
Sunday morning CBS television show "Face the Nation" Democratic
Senator Robert Menendez said the online debacle was "the equivalent of
having a great item that you want to buy in the store, but not being able to
get through the front door."
"It
sounds like the front door's been opened successfully now," he said,
referring to Sunday's website update.
The website
has been far from Obama's only hitch while implementing the hotly-contested
legislation, which was derided by Republicans and only upheld in the US Supreme
Court by a narrow 5-4 vote.
On November
14, Obama agreed to change the law to try to help Americans whose insurance
plans were canceled because they did not meet the more stringent requirements
under the new reforms, after previous promises that no American would lose
their existing coverage.
"We
are two months into a sustained outreach and education campaign that will
continue through the end of March," Bataille said, alluding to the need to
raise awareness and get people back online to sign up for new health plans.
Related Articles:
goldenageofgaia.com, Steve Beckow, An Hour with an Angel, September 30, 2013, with Archangel Michael
"... SB: Oh! Very good! Okay. I think I recall you mentioning Medicare in Canada. Canada has a wonderful system of universal medicare. When will the United States enjoy the same quality of medicare? Or other nations, for that matter.
AAM: You see, this is one of the fundamental rights, and your United Nations has just begun to peek at this. All of your — yes, all — of your medical systems have been based on false grids that you are eligible for disease. Many, many industries have grown up around this belief system.
Now, we would not dismantle this in a day, because the displacement would be very large, but you have already begun to see the shift to wellness, to healing centers, to alternative methods of energy healing. And with the arrival of your star brothers and sisters this will become even more so.
So not only universal medical care, but universal healthcare and the right to wellness is going to become the simple stand-alone fact over the next year to two years. Oh, and it will happen much more quickly in the United States.
SB: Oh, that’s good to hear. So many people are bankrupted by a sudden illness. And it never should be that way.
AAM: It is an atrocity that one may suffer and die because one does not have adequate money. That is absurd. ..."
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