November 18, 2014
Following last year’s launch of the Affordable Care Act’s open enrollment issues, all eyes were on the start of the same period this year. About 100,000 people went ahead and submitted their applications for health insurance on November 15, the first day people could do such a thing under the ACA this year. Sylvia Mathews, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services said that so far, the relaunch has gone quite a bit better than one year ago.
“The vast majority of people coming to the site were able to get on and do what they intended to do,” Burwell said, according to The Wall Street Journal. In addition to the 100,000 people who actually submitted their applications, another 500,000 logged onto the site and browsed around for potential insurance coverage.
While those numbers were impressive, it stands to reason the more impressive numbers were the people who reported having significant issues getting on the site and navigating it. While the number is probably not zero, it doesn’t appear there have been any significant spikes in those having basic problems. That’s a huge win for the administration and people looking for insurance. While a lot of the problems have come on the federal level, state healthcare exchanges have had their own brand of . States like had been working overtime in the lead-up to the relaunch in order to have their call centers and exchanges up and ready to go.
The government said that if there were some login issues, most of those stemmed from people who had not reset their passwords from earlier in the year. When the Heart Bleed virus was an issue this summer, the website had told people they would need to choose a new password. Those who didn’t had their passwords deleted and would have had problems getting on the site on Saturday. Other than that, the Obama administration is crossing its fingers and hoping this year’s launch is indeed going to continue to be a smooth one.
