It’s easy to be snarky about the anemic launch of Healthcare.gov, but December 1, marks a relaunch of sorts and its important for everyone who needs affordable health insurance.

It’s a new day and it should be easier to use the Obamacare website to apply and actually sign up for health insurance.

 

Jeff Zients, a technology whiz who has supervised the overhaul of Healthcare.gov said, on a Sunday morning conference call, “Healthcare.gov is night and day from where it was October 1st. The site is now stable.”

SAFE TO USE HEALTHCARE.GOV NOW

This means it’s likely that you can log on and go through the application process and shop for insurance without facing error messages, blank pages and frustration.

We’re told that 50,000 people can log on and use the site at the same time and a minimum of 800,000 people can use Healthcare.gov to apply for health insurance every day.

Yet Zients cautions that, “There may be times when there is too much volume and we’ve established a queueing system. If there are too many people on the site at one time, you’ll get a message just like the ones you receive online during a busy customer service experience.”

If the site is at its capacity you will be emailed with information about when to come back to the site. The system will provide a link that allows you to go to the head of the line when you log on again.

FIVE WEEK FIXES  

All this is possible because, during the past five weeks, the Obama administration brought on a new team and outside consultants to fix what what was clearly broken. The new team worked round the clock and made 400 software repairs and upgrades to the system. They made key hardware upgrades as recently as this past Friday night. In addition, 12 servers will exclusively handle the website traffic.

Zients told reporters that response times are now under a second and error rates are down under 1 percent and the system is stable with far speedier up-times.

PEOPLE WHO TRIED THE SYSTEM BEFORE GET PRIORITY 

People who tried to apply for insurance and couldn’t get through the glitches will now be getting priority. Julie Bataille, a spokeswoman for the Department of Medicare and Medicaid Services, said Sunday morning, “Our focus is on making sure that those who have tried to enroll in the past several weeks are able to complete that process. “

 

 

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