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Obamacare's split-screen debut
Politico
Jonathan Allen
10/1/2013
Excerpt:
There’s a simple reason, the administration says, for the difficulty folks are having signing up for Obamacare: It’s so popular.
Agencies mobilized late Tuesday morning 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.
Officials at the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services say that unexpectedly high traffic on federal and state Websites has created long online waiting times.
“We are thrilled that over 1 million people visited HealthCare.gov in the last day,” HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters said Tuesday. HHS officials said they expected to resolve the problems in a matter of hours. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which administer the new program, hastily set up a conference call for reporters.
Whatever the reason — failure to build good technology or failure to account for the number of website visitors — the rollout was full of kinks.
In state after state, users weren’t able to sign up for new health exchanges on the Web, encountering messages like “error establishing a database connection,” “your account couldn’t be created at this time,” and “please wait here until we send you the login page.” The federal government’s Website advised customers that “the system is down at the moment” around 9:30 a.m.
The portal for Maryland’s version of the health insurance marketplace, one of those expected to be in the best shape because Gov. Martin O’Malley and the legislature embraced Obamacare early on, told folks to try again at noon — four hours after the advertised opening of the exchange.
It was an inauspicious beginning for the exchanges, which are the heart and soul of a law designed to provide insurance subsidies for millions of Americans who had no coverage. And in an anxiety-filled, only-in-Washington split-screen moment for both President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans, that heart of the law began pumping for the first time Tuesday morning just as the rest of the federal government had shut down.
But the White House expressed certainty that the program would be just fine.
“Will there be some glitches? There always are in the introduction of these programs,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said on MSNBC. “What is absolutely true is that in all 50 states of the country, today Americans who have not been able to get to affordable health insurance will.”
Obama will hold an event in the Oval Office at noon Tuesday with folks who can now sign up for health insurance under the law, before delivering a statement in the Rose Garden.
Before Tuesday morning, the juxtaposition of the rollout and the shutdown had seemed sure to serve up a delicious irony for Democrats: Republicans couldn’t stop the launch of the one program they’ve been trying to kill by threatening the functioning of the government and the credit of the United States.
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View the complete article at:
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/1...own-97601.html
Politico
Jonathan Allen
10/1/2013
Excerpt:
There’s a simple reason, the administration says, for the difficulty folks are having signing up for Obamacare: It’s so popular.
Agencies mobilized late Tuesday morning 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.
Officials at the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services say that unexpectedly high traffic on federal and state Websites has created long online waiting times.
“We are thrilled that over 1 million people visited HealthCare.gov in the last day,” HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters said Tuesday. HHS officials said they expected to resolve the problems in a matter of hours. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which administer the new program, hastily set up a conference call for reporters.
Whatever the reason — failure to build good technology or failure to account for the number of website visitors — the rollout was full of kinks.
In state after state, users weren’t able to sign up for new health exchanges on the Web, encountering messages like “error establishing a database connection,” “your account couldn’t be created at this time,” and “please wait here until we send you the login page.” The federal government’s Website advised customers that “the system is down at the moment” around 9:30 a.m.
The portal for Maryland’s version of the health insurance marketplace, one of those expected to be in the best shape because Gov. Martin O’Malley and the legislature embraced Obamacare early on, told folks to try again at noon — four hours after the advertised opening of the exchange.
It was an inauspicious beginning for the exchanges, which are the heart and soul of a law designed to provide insurance subsidies for millions of Americans who had no coverage. And in an anxiety-filled, only-in-Washington split-screen moment for both President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans, that heart of the law began pumping for the first time Tuesday morning just as the rest of the federal government had shut down.
But the White House expressed certainty that the program would be just fine.
“Will there be some glitches? There always are in the introduction of these programs,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said on MSNBC. “What is absolutely true is that in all 50 states of the country, today Americans who have not been able to get to affordable health insurance will.”
Obama will hold an event in the Oval Office at noon Tuesday with folks who can now sign up for health insurance under the law, before delivering a statement in the Rose Garden.
Before Tuesday morning, the juxtaposition of the rollout and the shutdown had seemed sure to serve up a delicious irony for Democrats: Republicans couldn’t stop the launch of the one program they’ve been trying to kill by threatening the functioning of the government and the credit of the United States.
...............................................
View the complete article at:
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/1...own-97601.html
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