By Roberta Rampton and Lewis Krauskopf
Nov 28 (Reuters) – President Barack Obama’s healthcare law
is facing its biggest test this weekend since its disastrous
Oct. 1 launch, as Americans find out whether the administration
has met a self-imposed deadline to fix its insurance shopping
website.
Another major outage of glitch-ridden HealthCare.gov could
spell more political trouble for the president, who was forced
to apologize for the botched rollout and admit burdening
Democratic Party allies in their bids for re-election to
Congress in 2014.
If the website does not work on Saturday’s deadline, that
could turn off millions of uninsured Americans, especially young
and healthy consumers whose participation in the new insurance
exchanges are critical for keeping costs in check.
Democratic leaders in Congress might also find it necessary
to extend open enrollment beyond the March 31 deadline and delay
fines mandated by the law for people who do not have insurance
by that date – a prospect that insurers warn would destabilize
the market.
Obama officials are confident that this second coming of
HealthCare.gov will be much improved from the Oct. 1 debut.
Millions of people looked into the website in its first month,
but only about 27,000 cleared the gauntlet of technical
obstacles to sign up for insurance.
The portal is the gateway for health insurance plans in 36
states under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,
commonly called Obamacare, which was passed in 2010. It is
intended to move the United States closer to universal care by
subsidizing insurance sold by the private sector for less
affluent families.
Officials have said that by Saturday the website will be
able to load quickly and work accurately for at least 80 percent
of users. They have said it will be able to handle 50,000
simultaneous visitors, for a daily total of about 800,000, twice
the capacity seen even on Wednesday before a final flurry of
hardware and software fixes over the Thanksgiving holiday.
And officials have warned that the website will still suffer
some delays and outages in the weeks to come. To help consumers
left hanging when traffic exceeds capacity, they have created a
new “queueing system” to tell consumers when to come back.
Short of a major outage, it may be difficult to immediately
measure the administration’s success because officials only
release enrollment figures once a month. That will make
anecdotes from consumers and enrollment groups all the more
important.
“Even if it’s working well, people will encounter problems,”
said Mark Hall, a Wake Forest University professor of law and
public health. “You hope there’s more good stories than bad
stories.”
OBAMA’S APPROVAL RATING DROPS
The abysmal launch of Obamacare has hurt the president and
congressional Democrats, with Obama’s approval ratings dipping
to the lowest point of his presidency. A Reuters/Ipsos poll this
week showed 56 percent of Americans disapprove of how Obama is
doing his job, while 38 percent approve.
If the situation worsens, Democrats could risk losing
control of the Senate in 2014, when 20 Democratic senators face
reelection, and many are in tight races.
Republicans have called for the law to be
scrapped because they consider it an unwarranted expansion of
the federal government and believe it will push up insurance
costs.
Obama’s chief of staff Denis McDonough now meets every other
week with Democratic senators running in 2014 to reassure them
Obamacare is on the mend, a White House official said.
The administration has prioritized fixes that consumers see,
leaving other parts of the system for a later date. On
Wednesday, officials said they would delay online enrollment for
small businesses for a year.
Obama issued a rare apology earlier this month for mishaps
with the rollout.
But as Nov. 30 has drawn closer, Obama has become more
assertive. “The website is continually working better, so check
it out,” Obama said in a speech on Tuesday.
Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services,
told a group of state and local officials on a call this week
that “we are definitely on track to have a significantly
different user experience by the end of this month.”
Insurance companies have also noticed the difference.
“I don’t expect this to be an overnight change because it
appears they have been making improvements as they go,” said J.
Mario Molina, chief executive of Molina Healthcare Inc,
a company offering plans in nine states, including California.
“It is easier to navigate. It’s working better. It’s
faster,” Molina said.
Even if the website does stand up to increased traffic,
there are issues on the system’s “back end” that need to be
addressed.
As much as 30 to 40 percent of the site still needs to be
built to handle payments and federal subsidies, a federal
official told lawmakers earlier this month.
And the administration is planning a “soft launch” with
small volumes for long-delayed Spanish language enrollment tools
for more than 10 million uninsured Latino Americans.
Once the website is fixed, the White House also faces the
challenge of raising awareness about the law. More than 35
percent of people without insurance say they have heard nothing
about the new marketplace, according to polling by the Kaiser
Family Foundation.
