As tech launches go, Obamacare has been pretty bumpy, if not a downright Fail Whale-style debacle according to a report in Bloomberg Businessweek. The federally run website was unresponsive for much of Tuesday morning, and only four of 15 exchange websites being run by states and the District of Columbia were working from 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. In the days before the launch, meanwhile, insurers complained about errors in the premiums that shoppers would see online and certain functions had to be delayed because the software that determined eligibility remained a work-in-progress.
“Like every new law, there will be glitches we’ll fix,” President Obama said during a Rose Garden speech. “This morning the [federal] site has been running more slowly than it normally will. The reason is more than one million people visited healthcare.gov before 7 this morning. There were five times more users this morning than had ever been on healthcare.gov at one time.”
The San Jose Mercury News reported that the widely anticipated rollout of California’s online health insurance exchange witnessed sluggish access and spotty problems Tuesday, but that didn’t stop state officials from labeling it “a historic day” that will begin to allow millions of Californians to access quality health care for the first time. For many, the array of plans and prices offered under Obamacare proved to be a welcome surprise, but others experienced sticker shock from significantly higher costs.
On the first day of a six-month open enrollment period, the California website received one million page views in the first hour, followed by 800,000 page views every hour after, according to Covered California staff. The computer system that was designed to accommodate 2,000 concurrent users was getting 3,000, officials said, while the exchange’s two operative call centers in the state received nearly 9,000 calls by noon. But there were problems. Users reported “horrendously slow” response times, with Web pages sometimes never loading. Some of the problems mimicked those around the country, where a combination of high demand and technical glitches seemed to overwhelm other online systems early in the day. But California’s exchange didn’t crash.
Covered California officials estimate that during the initial open-enrollment period, which ends March 31, they will enroll 500,000 to 700,000 Californians who are eligible for subsidies to make their care more affordable.
New York officials said roughly two million people had visited their state-run site by mid-afternoon.
However, Washington state residents going to their state-run exchange were greeted with the words “Connection Refused.” Officials said the problems impacted only some visitors, but the site appeared down into Tuesday evening.
In Oregon, which has one of the country’s 16 state-based exchanges, ;glitches also materialized.Visitors were told: “Online enrollment is coming soon! Sign up to receive an email notification when it’s available.” Officials had warned earlier this week visitors would need an insurance agent or another third party to sign up in the first several weeks.