It's unlikely the White House will fix all the problems with HealthCare.gov by the end of the month as the administration previously projected, the Washington Post reports.
The site continues to struggle with user volumes, encountering problems when it has more than 20,000 to 30,000 users at once, which is only about 50 percent of the site's intended capacity, according to the Post. CGI Federal, the contractor responsible for building the site, has only fixed about six of every 10 glitches it has encountered so far. The only way for large numbers of people to sign up in the near future, the Post states, would be to enroll by other means to keep from overwhelming the online system.
"We are working 24/7 to make improvements so that by the end of the month the site is working smoothly for the vast majority of users. We are making progress, including fixes to reduce error rates and get the site moving faster," Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Director of Communications Julie Bataille told the Post. "The challenges we are addressing today are a snapshot of November 12th, not November 30th."
Workers are trying to finetune the computer system so it can take outside queries from call centers and insurers about consumers' eligibility for subsidies by the end of this month, the article said.
And on Tuesday the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services e-mailed about 275,000 people who reported problems with shopping for insurance through the site encouraging them to try again, NBCNews.com reports.
Last week, CMS administrator Marilyn Tavenner expressed optimism about the future of the site, telling a Senate panel that the site had "improved" since its initial rollout. She also said security issues with the site were being resolved, FierceHealthcare previously reported.
To learn more:
- read the Post article
- listen and watch the NBCNews report (video)