Econintersect: On Monday (04 November 2013) the national HIX (health insurance exchange) HealthCare.gov crashed, with the sections providing enrollment and application tools were not available. The very next day Marilyn Tavenner, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, testified before the Senate Health, Education Labor and Pensions Committee. She said that HealthCare.gov enrollment facility has much improved over the month since it went through an abortive launch.
In her testimony Tavenner said:
“Users can now successfully create an account and continue through the full application and enrollment process. We are now able to process nearly 17,000 registrants per hour, or 5 per second, with almost no errors.”
Econintersect would suggest that the statement was prepared by a lawyer. It included the terminology “able to process” and said nothing about what the numbers were for the enrollments and applications actually completed.
The Monday crash was not as emabarassing as the crash that occurred last week at the very same time HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was testifying before Congress that the site “has never crashed“.
Among other issues that are being highlighted by Obamacare opponents are incomplete security certifications for HealthCare.gov which were disclosed last week.
Justin Wolters tweeted a graphic than summarizes winners and losers, created by Ryan Lizza for an article in The New Yorker:
With a huge assist from Jon Gruber & @RyanLizza I made a graph to help you understand winners & losers from Obamacare pic.twitter.com/0LoYNNrXGr
— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) October 31, 2013
In addition to Ryan Lizza, other discussions of winners and losers have been published, including a summary review by Charles Ornstein (ProPublica).
Aaron Carrol of The Incidental Economist reported on 05 November at Academy Health Blog that 40% of those eligible for ACA coverage are unaware of that.
Sources:
- HealthCare.gov’s enrollment system crashes Monday (Grant Gross, IT World, 04 November 2013)
- Tavenner says website improved and improving (Alan Fram and Ricardo Alonzo-Zaldivar, Life Health Pro, 05 November 2013)
- HealthCare.gov suffers outage as Sebelius testifies that it’s never crashed (Michael Krumboltz, Yahoo! News, 30 October 2013)
- HealthCare.gov security issues surface (Laurie Kellman and Ricardo Alonz-Zaldivar, Life Health Pro, 31 October 2013)
- Obamacare’s three percent (Rylan Lizza, The New Yorker, 30 October 2013)
- A Month in to Healthcare.gov, Real-Life Winners and Losers (Charles Ornstein, ProPublica, 04 November 2013)
- Data on those who are eligible for insurance on the exchanges (Aaron Carrol, The Incidental Economist, Academy Health Blog, 05 November 2013)
