Obamacare Website Fixes Could Take Two Weeks—or Up to Two Months
After two weeks of problems affecting the Health Insurance Marketplace rolled out as part of the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”), a report in the New York Times shows that government officials aren’t quite sure how long it will take to fix the $400 million system.
“One person familiar with the system’s development said that the project was now roughly 70 percent of the way toward operating properly, but that predictions varied on when the remaining 30 percent would be done,” the Times reported yesterday. “‘I’ve heard as little as two weeks or as much as a couple of months,’ that person said. Others warned that the fixes themselves were creating new problems, and said that the full extent of the problems might not be known because so many consumers had been stymied at the first step in the application process.”
As we’ve reported, Healthcare.gov has had trouble keeping up with traffic demands. With people unable to log into their accounts, government contractors mistakenly told health insurance seekers that their passwords had been reset.
Government IT projects (and even non-government IT projects) fail all the time, so the Healthcare.gov problems are perhaps no surprise. But this project’s failures are more noticeable than most due to having an immediate impact on US residents, many of whom are attempting to purchase health insurance to comply with an individual mandate.
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