The second coming of Obamacare website - will it work?
By Roberta Rampton and Lewis Krauskopf
(Reuters) - President Barack Obama's healthcare law is facing its biggest test this weekend since its disastrous October 1 launch, as Americans find out whether the administration has met a self-imposed deadline to fix its insurance shopping website.
Another major outage of glitch-ridden HealthCare.gov could spell more political trouble for the president, who was forced to apologize for the botched rollout and admit burdening Democratic Party allies in their bids for re-election to Congress in 2014.
If the website does not work on Saturday's deadline, that could turn off millions of uninsured Americans, especially young and healthy consumers whose participation in the new insurance exchanges are critical for keeping costs in check.
Democratic leaders in Congress might also find it necessary to extend open enrollment beyond the March 31 deadline and delay fines mandated by the law for people who do not have insurance by that date - a prospect that insurers warn would destabilize the market.
Obama officials are confident that this second coming of HealthCare.gov will be much improved from the October 1 debut. Millions of people looked into the website in its first month, but only about 27,000 cleared the gauntlet of technical obstacles to sign up for insurance.
The portal is the gateway for health insurance plans in 36 states under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly called Obamacare, which was passed in 2010. It is intended to move the United States closer to universal care by subsidizing insurance sold by the private sector for less affluent families.
Officials have said that by Saturday the website will be able to load quickly and work accurately for at least 80 percent of users. They have said it will be able to handle 50,000 simultaneous visitors, for a daily total of about 800,000, twice the capacity seen even on Wednesday before a final flurry of hardware and software fixes over the Thanksgiving holiday.
And officials have warned that the website will still suffer some delays and outages in the weeks to come. To help consumers left hanging when traffic exceeds capacity, they have created a new "queuing system" to tell consumers when to come back.
Short of a major outage, it may be difficult to immediately measure the administration's success because officials only release enrollment figures once a month. That will make anecdotes from consumers and enrollment groups all the more important.
"Even if it's working well, people will encounter problems," said Mark Hall, a Wake Forest University professor of law and public health. "You hope there's more good stories than bad stories."