Obamacare Website Fixes Successful According To White House, Problems Persist

The troubled Obamacare website has been declared “fixed” for 80 percent of users according to the White House, however, reports are that problems persist.

November 30 was the self imposed deadline President Obama set for the website to function properly, after the disastrous rollout almost two months prior.

On Sunday, exactly two months from when the Obamacare website, Healthcare.gov, went live on October 1, the administration is calling the fixes they have put in place successful.

“We’ve doubled the system’s capacity and HealthCare.gov can now support its intended volume,” Jeff Zients, the administration official overseeing repairs to the system, said on a conference call with reporters Sunday.

Zients says the Obamacare website can now handle 50,000 users at one time and 800,000 users on a single day. It is unclear what the original number of users the site could handle was when it first went online, but it is reported it crashed with only a few thousand visitors on at one time.

There is also marked improvement on the site’s response time and error rate for applicants.

Zients characterized the process of signing on to the Obamacare website as something similar to getting onto a highway, “we have widened the system’s on-ramp. It now has four lanes, instead of two.”

In the weeks following the failed launch of Healthcare.gov the President’s poll numbers have plummeted. The November 30 deadline was something the White House needed to deliver on to stop the eight-week onslaught of negative news regarding Obamacare.

The administration was also under pressure from fellow Democrats who are up for re-election in 2014, as they were are getting complaints from their constituents and will get an ear full when Congress takes a recess for the holidays.

According to a report released by the Department of Health and Human Services the marketplace, which was down about 60 percent of the time in October, is now much more stable.

As of late November, it was accessible and available daily more than 90 percent of the time, on average, officials said, according to Yahoo!

But all this doesn’t mean there are no problems with Healthcare.gov.

The Obamacare website continues to be down five percent of the time and officials are still concerned about slow-down during high traffic periods.

Due to these persistent issues, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius suggested to users that they visit during off-peak times on nights and weekends.

However, if most users start following her advise, they will create their own high volume traffic, which could create potential problems and a exactly what the administration is trying hard to avoid.

Problems for insurance companies have not been addressed with these fixes, as they continue to complain about unreliable data on applicants which they receive from the site.

The Obama administration has not yet finished building the electronic payment system that will transfer government subsidies to insurance companies to help cover the cost of plans, according to ABC News.

The new report has shed light on the Obamacare website’s shortcomings from its inception and many are asking why these issues weren’t addressed in the first place.

The report contradicts the administration’s early explanation on the Obamacare website’s problems, that high volumes of visitors to the site were causing it to go offline.

It turns out to be a combination of software and hardware glitches that made the Obamacare website go down two months ago.

“There is more work to be done to continue to improve and enhance the website and continue to improve the consumer experience in the weeks and months ahead,” the report on the Obamacare website says. “While we strive to innovate and improve our outreach and systems for reaching consumers, we believe we have met the goal of having a system that will work smoothly for the vast majority of users.”