Long waits, error messages, unresponsiveness.
Hallmarks of the troubled launch of the Health Insurance Marketplace at healthcare.gov continued to stymie South Florida residents and counselors trying to access the website on Monday - more than two months after the Oct. 1 launch, and despite the government's self-imposed deadline of Nov. 30 for the system to function smoothly for the 'vast majority of Americans.''
At Borinquen Medical Center, a community clinic with seven locations in Miami-Dade County, counselors turned away consumers Monday morning because they could not access healthcare.gov, said Jason Conner, who manages Borinquen's enrollment team of 10 full-time counselors.
'We've seen steady improvements over the last two weeks,'' Conner said Monday afternoon. 'Today, however, seems to be an anomaly to those two weeks, and we're not able to enter the system at all.... It was working better last week than today.''
With less than three weeks until the Dec. 23 deadline for individuals to purchase policies that take effect on Jan. 1, Obama administration officials said on Monday that healthcare.gov has vastly improved but conceded that the website still may not be able to handle the crush of people expected to seek insurance this month.
A cornerstone of the Affordable Care Act and the vehicle through which millions of uninsured Americans are expected to gain coverage, healthcare.gov serves 36 states, including Florida. Fourteen states and the District of Columbia manage their own state-based online marketplaces, or exchanges, which also have experienced technical problems but enrolled more people in October than the federal site, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
Federal officials said Monday that the site's functionality has greatly improved since launch, and that more Americans are enrolling every day. But they cautioned that problems will persist - particularly during periods of high demand, said Julie Bataille, communications director for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency that administers healthcare.gov.
Bataille said the website had hosted 375,000 unique visitors between midnight and noon Monday. 'That's roughly twice the size of what we had been seeing on a typical Monday,'' she said, noting that website usage peaks from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekdays but slows down during early mornings, evenings and weekends.
In fact, Bataille said, website visits on Monday reached a point where federal officials deployed a new customer queuing system for the first time.
The queuing system gives consumers the option of waiting in line with a timer appearing on their screen, or leaving the website and waiting to receive an email notifying them of the best time to return and resume their applications.
Bataille said the technical team working to repair healthcare.gov also made significant progress in another area: so-called 834 forms, which transmit consumers' enrollment information to insurers. Without that data, insurers cannot be certain who has enrolled in their plans, and consumers cannot be assured that they are covered.
Those forms had been riddled with errors, according to previous reports, but Bataille said on Monday that 'most of those fixes that were needed have been addressed.''
They range from an old-fashioned traveling medicine show to a cutting edge interactive virtual reality art project, from reviving the work of a near-forgotten poet to dances at the reviving Miami Marine Stadium, from programs bringing foreign artists to South Florida and Miami artists into the city's schools and neighborhoods.
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The new, improved healthcare.gov was acting a lot like the bad, old website on Monday for many in South Florida.
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Posted by Unknown on Monday, December 2, 2013 - Rating: 4.5
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