Administration gives positive progress report on health care website fixes

Obama administration officials announced Sunday morning that they had met their deadline in terms of making improvements to healthcare.gov.

The Washington Post: HealthCare.gov Meets Deadline For Fixes, White House Says
Administration officials announced Sunday that they had met their Saturday deadline for improving HealthCare.gov after completing a series of hardware upgrades and software fixes to the troubled Web site. A progress report released Sunday morning by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said: "While we strive to innovate and improve our outreach and systems for reaching consumers, we believe we have met the goal of having a system that will work smoothly for the vast majority of users" (Sun, 12/1).

The New York Times: Obama Administration Says Health Care Web Site Is Vastly Improved
In effect, the administration gave itself a passing grade. Because of hundreds of software fixes and hardware upgrades in the past month, it said, the website -; the main channel for people seeking to buy insurance under President Obama's health care law -; is now working more than 90 percent of the time, up from 40 percent during some weeks in October. ... Much of the progress in the past five weeks resulted from radical changes in the management of HealthCare.gov, according to the report. Technology experts concluded in mid-October that "HealthCare.gov was fixable, but only with significant changes to the management approach and a relentless focus on execution," it said (Pear, 12/1).

Reuters: Obama Administration Declares Victory On Fixing HealthCare.gov
The new performance levels mark significant improvement after the Obamacare website's disastrous October 1 launch, when it crashed in the face of high traffic volumes and remained down 60 percent of the time for weeks. But officials remain concerned about high volumes this month, with the potential for large numbers of people entering the site to apply for insurance coverage beginning January 1 (Morgan, 12/1).

Los Angeles Times: HealthCare.gov Website Working For Most Users, Officials Say
Web pages on the site now load in less than a second, down from eight seconds in late October. The system now operates more than 90% of the time. For some weeks in October, the site was up for only 40% of the time. And the average rate of time-outs or other Web-page failures on the site has dropped to around three-quarters of a percent. It was as high as 6% in October (Levey, 12/1).

USA Today: White House Announces HealthCare.gov Met Repair Goals
"The bottom line is health care.gov on December first is night and day from where it was October first," said Jeffrey Zients, the president's appointee to fix the website's problems. "The site is now stable and operating at its intended capacity at greatly improved performance." When the site -; which allows people to compare private plan benefits and costs before buying an insurance policy -; launched Oct. 1, millions of people were disappointed by slow or frozen pages, an inability to log in, and incorrect or missing information. The White House tapped Zients to lead a team to fix the site (Kennedy, 12/1).

Reaction on the Sunday morning news programs was swift -

Reuters: Obama Administration Says Achieves Key Goal Of Fixing HealthCare.gov
Republican critics of the healthcare reform law known as Obamacare were quick to dismiss the administration's achievement as overstated. "Have they made some progress? Yes. They brought in some private sector folks to try to get the functionality up. It still doesn't function right," Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan said on NBC's "Meet the Press" program. Democrats, who face a tough congressional midterm election battle in 2014 that could be complicated by Obamacare's rocky rollout, sounded a cautious note. Some nervous party members have called for a delay of the law's individual mandate that requires people to be enrolled in coverage by March 31 or pay a penalty. "This is going to take some time before it's up and kicking and in full gear," Democratic Representative Chris Van Hollen said on "Meet the Press" (Morgan and Krauskopf, 12/1).