By Elise Viebeck
-
10/18/13 01:20 PM ET excerpt from The Hill:
The problems for the main ObamaCare enrollment portal are going from bad to worse.
ObamaCare's
online marketplace is reportedly creating a mess for insurance
companies by approving error-ridden applications, the latest in a series
of problems that threaten to dampen enrollment under the healthcare
law.
Among the small number of people who have successfully
purchased coverage, many have filed out duplicate enrollments,
misreported family members or left data fields empty, insurers told
The Wall Street Journal.
These
errors were attributed to flaws in the design of the online enrollment
system, which does not easily allow users to fix their mistakes.
October 17th, 2013 CNN's Jake Tapper excerpt:
President Barack Obama's presidential campaign, and indeed his administration, have been well-known for being on the cutting edge of technology.
Yet when it came to the roll out of Obama's signature domestic policy achievement, someone dropped the tech-savvy ball.
The federal exchange website "healthcare.gov" has at times been slow, inaccessible to users, and – in the words of the White House – prone to frequent "glitches."
and:
"According to other IT experts, it's been software issues, in
addition to not knowing what the volume was going to be," said former
Medicare director for the George H. W. Bush administration Gail
Wilensky.
An early policy decision put undue burden on the website, said Wilensky.
Normally, online shoppers can browse products anonymously, decide
whether they want to buy something, and then go through the process of
providing personal information.
"The administration made the decision that they didn't want people to
look at options, unless they also had the subsidy that they would
receive available to them. They were afraid of sticker shock," said
Wilensky.
