As Troubles Persist, Feds Announce Planned Downtime For HealthCare.gov.
According to the National Association of Health Underwriters, November 4, 2013,
Sunday night, ABC World News predicted “another trying week ahead for this White House and their troubled rollout of the President’s healthcare plan.” According to “a new message on their website,” the “online application part of the site will be down every night from 1:00 a.m., to 5:00 a.m., for maintenance as troubleshooters continue to work out the bugs.”
On its website, NBC News (11/4, Welker, Black) reports further on the news that healthcare.gov’s application page “will go offline daily while a technology team works to resolve problems.”
Despite the planned downtime to fix healthcare.gov, though, the Wall Street Journal (11/4, Radnofsky, Paletta, Subscription Publication) reports that the Obama Administration is thus far refusing to suspend the site entirely. According to a senior official, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough concluded that keeping the website open would allow more complete improvements by the unofficial November 30 deadline many are pointing to.
The Los Angeles Times (11/4, Hennessey) reports that on ABC’s This Week, White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer claimed that President Obama “was assured that the healthcare insurance website was ready to launch on Oct. 1, even as private contractors and some administration officials knew the site had failed in early testing.” The Times notes that “along with the president, Pfeiffer hyped the website” before its rollout, “promising it would ‘be a consumer experience unmatched by anything in government, but also in the private sector.’”
According to The Hill (11/4, Balluck), Pfeiffer acknowledged that “the first enrollment numbers which will be released later this month are not going to be what we want them to be,” but added, “The good news here is the history of programs like this … is that people sign up toward the end.”
The Wall Street (11/4, Paletta) “Washington Wire” blog reports that on Sunday, Pfeiffer also predicted that after “we get the website working…by the end of this month…we’re going to be in a good place.” Reuters (11/3, Rampton) covers the Administration’s campaign to counter criticism of the ACA on Twitter, which is said to be coordinated by Pfeiffer.
And over the weekend, the AP (11/3) reported that HHS said HealthCare.gov was expected to be down from 9 p.m. Saturday until 9 a.m. Sunday, so people who wanted to apply for insurance were directed to use the 800 number during that time. The down time was longer than previous maintenance windows of a few hours, but the Obama Administration “has said it’s aiming to have HealthCare.gov humming along by month’s end.”
The AP (11/2, Alonso-Zaldivar) reported that despite ongoing setbacks, officials said on Friday that “they remain on track to have HealthCare.gov humming along by the end of the month.” For example, Jeff Zients, the “former Office of Management and Budget official brought in as chief troubleshooter,” said, “We made progress and also ran into some roadblocks that slowed us down. We are on track for our end of November goal.” And in another bright spot of coverage, USA Today (11/1, Kennedy) reported that on Friday, the Obama Administration announced that there has been “more than an 80% improvement” in wait times for healthcare.gov.
From NAHU
