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Just six people got insurance through HealthCare.gov on day one
Just six people got insurance through HealthCare.gov on day one
With many features broken, only a half-dozen managed to get through bugs.
by Sean Gallagher - Nov 1 2013, 10:46am CDT
With many features broken, only a half-dozen managed to get through bugs.
by Sean Gallagher - Nov 1 2013, 10:46am CDT
We now know how many people were able to get through the bugs in HealthCare.gov the first day and register for insurance: six. That's according to meeting notes from a "war room" meeting on the afternoon of October 2 at the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance (CCII), the organization inside the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) responsible for oversight of the Affordable Care Act insurance program.
The notes, which were released October 31 by Republican members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, detail the woes the site experienced on its first day. The six lucky people who scored insurance on day one managed to succeed because their unique circumstances didn’t run into a fine sieve of feature problems that blocked most who tried from getting through the front door and derailed others quickly afterward.
The litany of woes detailed in the meeting:
There were over 4.7 million unique visitors during the first 24 hours of operations. Things were slightly better on day two: 248 people managed to register.
The notes, which were released October 31 by Republican members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, detail the woes the site experienced on its first day. The six lucky people who scored insurance on day one managed to succeed because their unique circumstances didn’t run into a fine sieve of feature problems that blocked most who tried from getting through the front door and derailed others quickly afterward.
The litany of woes detailed in the meeting:
- "High capacity on the website." The site launched running in a single Verizon Terremark data center, and there wasn't enough capacity provisioned—in particular, for the enterprise identity management system that was used to create accounts for both individuals and insurance agent-brokers. As a result, few agent-brokers were able to sign into the system to assist people trying to get insurance, and individuals brave enough to try themselves found themselves largely hung up at the site's front door.
- The direct enrollment system—which allowed individuals to sign up for a policy by being passed through to the issuer's website—was not working "for any issuers."
- Department of Veterans Affairs' system was "not connecting," meaning that the marketplace system couldn't verify people's eligibility for a subsidy, called an Advance Premium Tax Credit.
- "Experian creating confusion with credit check information." There were issues with the personal information in Experian data that the system wasn't able to handle, and Experian's own help desk was slow in dealing with issues—so the CMS had to add help desk people to assist them.
- Of the six servers deployed to handle determining eligibility and enrollment requirements based on where insurance seekers lived, four were deployed without the final production version of the data. Over 900 "issues" were found in the residency system.
There were over 4.7 million unique visitors during the first 24 hours of operations. Things were slightly better on day two: 248 people managed to register.
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