Don’t Fear It, 5 Registrants a Second and Other HealthCare.Gov News
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Follow key reporting on the Obama administration’s signature policy initiative.
The rocky rollout of HealthCare.gov, the website for people to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, has garnered a lot of attention from the media as well as technology analysts. Here's our daily roundup of some of the key reports you may have missed:
- The government is planning a media blitz to make sure HealthCare.gov glitches haven’t chased away young, healthy people from Obamacare. Marilyn Tavenner, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the TV, radio and print campaign will start in December, when the site is supposed to be running smoothly.
- Asked if Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius had the authority to delay the launch of HealthCare.gov, Tavenner said she didn’t know. Lawmakers are eager to know who to blame for the failed marketplace launch.
- President Obama, meanwhile, is homing in on the lessons. He says it’s time to rethink how the government buys information technology. After the site is fixed we’ll need “to talk about federal procurement when it comes to IT and how that’s organized.”
- The site is supposed to ‘operate smoothly’ by the end of November. It currently goes down periodically for maintenance and occasionally without explanation. Still, it’s capable of processing 17,000 registrants per hour, or five per second, with almost no errors, Tavenner told Congress.
- Also, officials have apparently dropped a widely disliked requirement that ‘window shoppers’ who just want to check out plan prices first register in the system.
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