Wednesday 12 November 2014

Obamacare Website To Crash Again? Health Insurance Enrollment In 2015 Will Use Virtual Waiting Rooms

The Obamacare website may have many Americans worried about their health insurance enrollment in 2015. After all, what if there is another Obamacare website crash that prevents people from signing up with a good plan?

In a related report by the Inquisitr, an Obamacare architect claims the American public is too stupid to understand the Affordable Care Act, and says the health care law was written the way it was because "lack of transparency is a huge political advantage." Already, Republicans have pledged to repeal Obamacare now that the GOP has both a House and Senate majority following the 2014 elections. But President Obama has already addressed the issue by saying that if a Republican Congress does attempt to repeal the entire Affordable Care Act, he will simply not sign the bill into law.

"On health care, there are certainly some lines I’m going to draw," he said. "Repeal of the law I won’t sign. Efforts that would take away health care from the 10 million people who now have it and the millions more who are eligible to get it we’re not going to support."

At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to see a case that challenges key components of Obamacare. But while the political fallout is working itself out, many Americans just want to see the Obamacare website work this time around.

When the Obamacare website first launched last year, the writers of the Inquisitr attempted to access Healhcare.gov at 4 a.m. in hopes of writing about the experience. Even in the middle of the night, the Obamacare website could not handle the load, and like us, many Americans subsequently gave up. The president admitted that many American did not sign up for health insurance plans because of the "screw up" with the Obamacare website, but he claims everything will be "triple-checked" before the new enrollment period begins.

Earlier this year, Kathleen Sebelius admitted that the Obamacare website was not ready for prime time. Independent analysts confirmed the performance problems were most likely caused by the design of HealthCare.gov. The initial version required Americans to register for an account, confirm email, validate identity, and validate eligibility before they could see any health insurance plan information, which created an unnecessary up-front bottleneck. This meant all these processes were hitting the server databases as soon as someone attempted to create a HealtherCare.gov user account. Creating that bottleneck up-front puts all users down the same funnel — even those who were only curious and had little intention to buy insurance. Chief digital architect Henry Chao also admitted that critical systems linking in to state exchanges were still being built even after the Obamacare website had officially launched.

This time around, the federal government is hoping to curtail some of those performance issues by allowing Americans to do some of the initial sign up now before the enrollment period begins this weekend. The biggest change is a new system that allows the Obamacare website to "throttle" its capacity by detecting performance issues and then sending applicants into online waiting rooms. Originally, everyone was supposed to go through the same queue, which caused the entire system to crash. By making people wait, it’s hoped the crashing issues may be avoided, although no one knows for certain how long Americans will be sitting in these virtual waiting rooms.

The design of the Obamacare website has also been overhauled in order to reduce the server load. According to Nicole Dozier, co-director of the Health Access Coalition, this was accomplished by reducing the number of web pages necessary to take action.

"It was about 76 screens [last year] which was a lot of screens," Dozier said according to ABC11. "Now, it’s down to about 16 screens with fewer clicks, so I think that just saves time. Things seem more complex when they are longer."

For the full details of the Obamacare enrollment period for 2015, click on the linked-to article. The first date for active enrollment on Healthcare.gov begins November 15, 2014 and ends on February 15, 2015.

Source: Inquisitr

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