There have been noticeable improvements, but glitches and bugs continue to frustrate users of the federal government’s online healthcare marketplace.
After a dismal start in October, the Obama administration now reports that about 95 percent of users of Healthcare.gov are able to register and enroll in health care plans with relative ease. But according to media reports, insurance brokers and industry officials maintain that the system is flawed, complicated to navigate and prone to errors.
Administration officials spent weeks upgrading the website. By the end of November, they said it could handle 50,000 users at the same time, the number it was expected to handle when the site was launched in October.
Still, reviews have been mixed.
Amanda Crowell, UnityPoint Health-Trinity’s director of revenue cycle, told Associated Press that the organization’s 15 counselors did not see significant improvement on the site in the first week of December.
“We had very high hopes for today, but those hopes were very much quashed,” said Crowell.
Starla Redmon, 58, told AP that she successfully enrolled in one hour with help from an enrollment counselor in Illinois.
Redmon said she works two part-time jobs and has been without health insurance for four years.
“Everything she typed in went through,” said Redmon who qualified for a $75 tax credit to help pay for her bronze plan. “It was the cheapest plan I could go with.”
As the Dec. 23 enrollment deadline looms, there are concerns that the system could again be overwhelmed as people rush to buy their health plans. There also are reports that as many as one-third of enrollees could discover on Jan. 1 that their applications have errors or are incomplete.
In November Henry Chao, chief information officer for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said about 40 percent of the website including the bill paying function was still under construction.
Some of the general complaints about the website have been its requirement that people register and create accounts before they can browse through the marketplace. There also is a lack of a subsidy calculator. Instead, many seek out one provided on Kaiser Family Foundation’s website.
President Obama has been forceful in recent weeks in defending healthcare reform and stressing the federal website’s improvements.
“If I’ve got to fight another three years to make sure this law works, then that’s what I’ll do,” he said at a recent White House event.
