White House brushes off website snags in final rush to sign up for Obamacare

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/31/obamacare-white-house-health-insurance

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President Obama's controversial effort to bring health insurance to the millions of Americans without coverage ended its first year's enrolment phase on Monday where it began: with a broken website, and postponed deadlines.

But a bullish White House shrugged off the latest “technical snags” as a sign of the popularity of its online insurance marketplace, and claimed the Affordable Care Act has made a “remarkable turnaround since the dark days of October and November”.

Nearly seven million Americans are now expected to be enrolled in one of the private insurance policies offered through state and and federal exchanges by the end of the initial sign-up period.

Those who struggled to enrol before the official deadline of midnight March 31st because of a last-minute surge that temporarily prevented many from reaching the main federal website, healthcare.gov, will be processed over the coming days.

"There are a few people in this room and a few in the White House who wouldn't have predicted we would get to that number,” spokesman Jay Carney told reporters in the presidential briefing room.

The federal exchange, which was set up to handle customers from many Republican states that refused to set up marketplaces of their own, has been beset by a series of technical woes that initially caused the take-up rate to slip far behind initial estimates.

The complexity of the wider Affordable Care Act, which requires employers over a certain size to offer workplace health insurance and inflicts tax penalties on individuals who fail to get coverage, has also led to a series of delays to deadlines for the new rules.

But these latest last-minute problems, which saw healthcare.gov go down for a few hours on Monday, were largely volume-related, Carney claimed, arguing that it had been a victim of its own, albeit belated, success.

There were 2.9m visits to the website over the weekend, and more calls to the call centre last week than in the whole of February, according to the White House, which said the president was “gratified” by queues over the weekend.

Nevertheless, the recovery in overall numbers signing up may not be the panacea claimed by the administration.

Much depends on the demographic profile of those signing up for insurance. In order to keep costs down, the administration needs to get enough enrolments from younger, healthier people – who require less care than others, and are thus more profitable customers for the insurers – to balance out the older and sicker people who sign up.

Carney said detailed demographic data has yet to be released, but dismissed worries about it, and argued that Republican opponents were “now grasping for other things to criticise.”