Healthcare.gov - Nov. 18 - "Progress Over the Weekend"

[TomCADem]

Reuters, but not most cable news, has reported that navigators assisting people with obtaining coverage under the ACA have noticed a significant improvement in website performance, and here is the latest from the Healthcare.gov website on the updates:

http://www.hhs.gov/digitalstrategy/blog/2013/11/progress-over-weekend.html

Over the past few weeks, we’ve made measurable progress to improve HealthCare.gov, addressing both software glitches and hardware upgrades–all of which will make a meaningful difference in the consumer experience.

I’m pleased to say that, as of today, we’ve cleared more items from our punch list that will have a direct, positive impact on consumers using the site. The pace and quality of execution on bug fixes and hardware upgrades intensified when QSSI came in as general contractor and thanks to their management and coordination with CMS leadership and our other contractors we made progress over the weekend implementing important fixes.

Nearly half of the fixes resolved issues specifically related to issues within the application and another set of fixes focused on improving Plan Compare shopping functionality.

Some of the most consumer-facing examples of improvements are:

•Issues that were preventing some users from proceeding through the income information of the online application have been fixed.
•Users can now select “weekly,” for the frequency they receive unemployment benefits.

In the Plan Compare shopping:

•When consumers choose a Catastrophic coverage plan, the available dental coverage for that plan now appears properly.
•When users save plan information in the Plan Compare section, those results now display correctly.

In addition to these software fixes that significantly improve the user experience, we also increased system capacity. This upgrade is part of an ongoing hardware improvement process that will help keep the system stable with growing volume, improving overall system performance.

We have a lot more work to do but as this work to date demonstrates, HealthCare.gov is getting better and improving performance and user experiences each week. We will continue to make improvements and we won’t stop working until every American who wants it gains access to new options for quality, affordable health coverage.

[BlueStreak]

1. One notices that NONE of the MSM goofs ever cite ANY specific problem with healthcare.gov

They are all talking about the site as if it was October 7. The system has been mostly functional and stable throughout November. All they would need to do is simply log on and see for themselves. Or have an intern do it.

The fact that none of them has done that just shows that the media has no interest in the facts. Their only interest is in perpetuating the narrative.

[bluestate10]

2. Reality may over take the lying media (except for MSNBC).

There was a republican runoff in Louisiana over the weekend and the candidate that backed Medicaid expansion in Louisiana won by about 25 percentage points. Two weeks ago, a republican in Alabama who refused to spew hate on President Obama won easily over the candidate that did.

The worm is turning. The breaking point will be the November ACA enrollment numbers. If those numbers are robust, the game is over for republicans that resist the ACA.

[BlueStreak]

3. I think they will be robust

The people with the real problems are:

- Working poor in non-Medicaid states. The media doesn't give a shit about them.

- Those that already had policies that are doubling or tripling on the exchanges. There is a lot of noise here, but that will settle down with Obama's fix, and it isn't a huge number of people anyway.

As we get near the December 15 deadline for policies to be in effect January 1, there will be a real acceleration of enrollments. I bet there will be about a million people with enrollments either complete or in process by the end of November.

There are some serious problems with the ACA, and they really have nothing to do with the state of healthcare.gov. I wish the media would invest the effort to really learn about this so that they could have an intelligent discussion.