Beware, Republicans: HealthCare.gov Will Rise Again

[DonViejo]

By Michael Tomasky November 28th 2013 5:45 AM

OK, the Obamacare site should have worked right away. But it’s getting better every day, especially now that the man who saved ‘cash for clunkers’ is on the case.

As you spare a moment for the truly needy this Thanksgiving—you do do that, right?—I doubt you’ll be giving a thought to the techies working around the clock to fix HealthCare.gov.

But with or without your good will, they’ll be working. And while the site isn’t going to be perfect by the administration’s self-imposed deadline of November 30, it has undergone tremendous improvements and will continue to. I’ve watched Republicans these last couple of days actually being idiotic enough to say in public that the Iran accord is a “distraction” that attempts to divert attention from the disaster that is Obamacare. Well, the Iran deal is a lot more than a distraction, and starting next week, Obamacare is going to be a lot less of a disaster than it was—and I wonder if Republicans have given thought to where this all might leave them six months from now.

Before I describe the systems and capacities now in place at the website, let me stipulate that yes, the people at Health and Human Services should have had all this taken care of two months ago. As I’ve written before, I don’t blame HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, nor do I blame Marilyn Tavenner, the Medicare and Medicaid administrator who’s walking point on all this. I blame Obama. Sure, in a way one blames them all, but this was his name and his legacy, and he should have been in people’s faces making sure this stuff was all on track.

Well, he wasn’t, and it wasn’t. But now...the media still tend to focus on the snafus, another of which occurred for about an hour Monday. But by and large, an HHS official tells me, things really have improved. On October 1, the average response time of a page on the site was eight seconds. Last week it was under one second. On October 1, the error rate—the number of pages that wouldn’t load because of some kind of error—was 6 percent. Last Friday it was .75 percent. The site is now ready, I’m told, to handle 50,000 users at any given time, and by December 1 will be able to accommodate 800,000 visits a day. That’s about as many people as visit The Daily Beast every day, and we’re one of the most highly-ranked digital news sites on the web. And keep in mind that Healthcare.gov, by definition, has to be a lot more complicated, making different calculations about eligibility for nearly every person who visits.

full article
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/11/28/beware-republicans-healthcare-gov-will-rise-again.html