Obama administration officials claimed Saturday they were “on track” to have the many ObamaCare website problems ironed out by their stated November 30 deadline.
“With the scheduled upgrades last night and tonight, we’re on track to meet our stated goal for the site to work for the vast majority of users,” Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services spokesman Aaron Albright told Fox News, in a statement.
White House officials have downplayed expectations since setting the deadline, repeatedly stating the site would work for the “vast majority of people.”
The Washington Post earlier Saturday reported the administration was prepared to announce Sunday that they have met deadlines for “improving” HealthCare.gov.
Officials will claim that the crash-prone site, which many experts claim will not be secure for users, will now be able to handle 50,000 users at once. But technicians failed to reach the deadline to fix at least some of the glitches, according to the Washington Post.
(Read Also: ObamaCare Website Problems ‘Impossible’ To Fix By Deadline)
A mere few hours before the deadline, CMS announced the site would be down for an extended period overnight Friday until 8 a.m. Saturday. During that time, the online application and enrollment systems were available, still.
There is no doubt that if the site doesn’t deliver on the White House promises, then President Obama’s credibility, political support and the very fate of his landmark health care law that bares his name could be in jeopardy. The president’s numbers on trust and approval have fallen to all-time lows since the failed rollout, as the majority of Americans now see the president as incompetent and untrustworthy.
However, if it is the case the site is able to recover, it will surely help the Democrats and the president restore confidence in the program and government, itself. But the question remains if the mainstream media will accept the qualified improvements, or if they will hold Obama and his administration to their word.
The financial success of ObamaCare is contingent upon young, healthy people to sign up for the program. If they lose interest or back away from the program, then it will blow a hole in the federal budget. A document obtained by People’s Pundit Daily from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, estimates that ObamaCare will already bring total health care expenditures to $5 trillion each year.
(Read Also: ObamaCare Cost To Push Health Expenditures To $5 Trillion By 2022)
The White House says it’s made numerous upgrades in both software and hardware over the last month, which also will allow the site to handle more than 800,000 visitors a day.
Still, in the days leading up to the deadline, the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services continued to scale back expectations, saying not to expect the site to be 100 percent glitch-free.
“If there are extraordinarily high spikes in traffic, which exceed the site’s capacity, consumers will be put in a new, advanced queuing system that will give them an expected wait time, or allow them to be notified via when they can return to the site,” CMS spokeswoman Julie Bataille said Monday.
Obama recently said he’d consider a “fix” to be successful if 80 percent of the people are able to navigate the site without a major problem.
(Read Also: Experts And Officials Say Insurance Death Spiral “Fix” Won’t Do!)
Democrats and Republicans will be closely watching the site this weekend. With the midterm elections less than a year away, it’s vital to Democrats that the site lives up to expectations the president set. Republicans have already suggested they’ll launch coordinated attacks linking every congressional Democrat up for re-election to ObamaCare.
In the House, the effort, based around dozens of votes to repeal the law, is about denying Democrats the 17-seat gain they would need to win back the majority. In the Senate, it’s about gaining the six seats Republicans need to take control of that chamber.
It was announced earlier this week that Families USA, a self-proclaimed non-partisan organization, has been given a $1.1 million grant to establish a database of ObamaCare “success stories.”
Families USA received the money from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on Oct. 4. The grant, which was first reported by CapitolCityProject.com, is meant to help Families USA expand the database of “real people” sharing their stories of enrolling in ObamaCare.
Reports surfaced exposing the grant in the same week that the White House announced they will unilaterally impose two more delays in an effort to minimize the law’s damage to their 2014 prospects.
On Wednesday, the administration announced that it would delay the launch of an online portal to the health insurance marketplace for small businesses until November 2015. Officials said that the decision to delay the launch had been taken because making repairs to the federal health exchange site, Healthcare.gov took priority.
The administration also announced that the launch of a Spanish-language sign-up tool would have to be postponed.
In recent weeks, the White House has also pushed back the enrollment deadline for individuals to December 23, given businesses with more than 50 workers until 2015 to provide required health insurance without paying a penalty, and moved the deadline date for individuals to avoid penalties for failing to get coverage back for six weeks.
There was also an announced schedule change in next year’s open enrollment season. It will start on November 15, 2014, which is conveniently 1 week or so after the midterm elections and 1 month later than originally scheduled. They now plan to finish on January 15 of 2015, roughly 5 weeks later than originally planned.
The midterm congressional elections are November 4, and congressional Republicans hammered the administration for changing the dates for political reasons, or in other words to hide any spike in 2015 premiums and mass cancelations.
(Read Also: PPD Study: 145 Million Americans Will Lose Health Insurance Plans)
The administration had also announced prior that it would allow insurance companies to extend for another year coverage under individual policies that don’t meet ObamaCare’s Essential Health Benefit Standards. Though the move was a response to anger over a wave of almost 5 million policy cancellations, experts and insurance officials said the president’s johnny come too late “fix” would lead to higher premiums, and speed up a potential insurance death spiral.
The majority of the states announced that they would not comply.
