Obama says marketplaces overwhelmed by demand

In remarks in the Rose Garden to mark the opening of these centerpieces of the health law, the president says federal officials are will overcome the technical problems.

Politico: Obamacare's Split-Screen Debut
President Barack Obama says there's a simple reason folks are having difficulty signing up for Obamacare on the first day of new health exchanges: It's so popular. "More than 1 million people visited healthcare.gov before 7 in the morning," Obama said in a Rose Garden press conference Tuesday afternoon, promising that the administration would figure out how to "handle all this demand." The White House and relevant agencies mobilized to try to seize hold of the narrative of Opening Day for health insurance exchanges, even as reports of technical glitches rolled in from around the country (Allen, 10/1). 

Kaiser Health News: Obamacare Marketplaces Open, Despite Glitches And Shutdown
After three years of political strife that intensified into a government shutdown on the eve of implementation, the engineers of the Affordable Care Act slipped the keystone of the law into place Tuesday, offering health coverage to uninsured millions with no certainty how the public will respond. Starting Tuesday, uninsured people can buy subsidized policies in government-operated marketplaces designed to overcome high prices, exceptions for preexisting illness, benefit caps and other decades-old obstacles that dominated the individual insurance market (Hancock and Rao, 10/1).

The Wall Street Journal: Health Exchanges Open For Business
In the early hours of enrollment, some of the online marketplaces, called exchanges, experienced delays. Minnesota officials still were testing software and postponed their exchange's launch until the afternoon. Maryland's marketplace asked consumers to return at noon, citing "connectivity" problems. And some people attempting to tap into the federal government's marketplace were asked to "please wait" due to heavy traffic. There was no indication that the federal government's partial shutdown over the congressional budget impasse affected the exchanges' rollout (Weaver and Martin, 10/1).

The New York Times: High Demand And Technical Snags Slow Debut Of Insurance Marketplaces
Heavy volume contributed to technical problems and delays that plagued the rollout Tuesday of the online insurance markets at the heart of President Obama's health care law, according to state and federal governments, with officials watching closely for clues to how well the system will work and how many people will take advantage of it. ... New York State's exchange began operating at 8 a.m. and received 2 million visits in the first hour and a half, "which far exceeds what we were expecting," said James O'Hare, a spokesman for the state Department of Health. Though some consumers encountered error messages or delays, the site was functioning and processing applications, though how many was not known, he said (Perez-Pena and Pear, 10/1).

The Associated Press: Insurance Markets Open To Surge Of New Customers
The online insurance marketplaces that are at the heart of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul struggled to handle the wave of new consumers Tuesday, the first day of a six-month open-enrollment period. ... Kimberly Shockley - logging in from Houston, Texas - and Mike Weaver, who lives in rural southern Illinois, ran into similar glitches: They could not get past the security questions while trying to set up their personal accounts through healthcare.gov. "I'm frustrated, very frustrated," said Shockley, a self-employed CPA. She spent more than an hour trying to get the security questions to work Tuesday morning without success. When she clicked on a drop-down menu of suggested security questions, none appeared. She then tried to create her own questions, but that didn't work either (Johnson, 10/1).

The Washington Post: Obamacare Site Goes Live, With Some Glitches
Uninsured Americans around the country showed up at health centers and logged onto government Web sites Tuesday morning in hopes of being among the first to sign up for coverage under the president's health-care law, but many ran into technical glitches that prevented them from enrolling. Among them was Paula Thornhill, 31, who turned up at the Greater Prince William Community Health Center in Virginia, a couple of her children in tow. Center staff told her the Web site was down, so they could not yet enroll her or tell her how much it would cost. But Thornhill, who is without health insurance, remained hopeful that she would be able to find affordable coverage (Somashekhar and Svrluga, 10/1).

The Los Angeles Times: Obamacare: Slow Start To First Day Of Signups At County-USC Hospital
It was a quiet morning at L.A. County-USC Medical Center on Tuesday, as signups for insurance coverage through the Affordable Care Act -- also known as Obamacare -- got underway. Hospital staff were mobilizing to sign up patients for expanded Medi-Cal coverage, but at 9:20 a.m., none had yet arrived at the entrance to the ER, where two men chatted at a bench outside and a few patients sat quietly awaiting care inside. Whether uninsured patients of the county's largest public hospital sign up for coverage under the provisions of the healthcare law -- or not -- could have a major impact on L.A. County's health services system, which currently pays for medical care for uninsured patients who cycle through its three public hospitals and network of public clinics (Brown, 10/1).