Now that the government shutdown has ended and the federal government is back to work President Barack Obama is going to address the nation on Monday about the difficulties encountered by the health insurance exchanges that opened at the beginning of October, according to the Associated Press.
The health insurance exchange market, the first significant implementation of the Affordable Care Act, opened on Oct. 1 and has been dogged by a myriad of computer issues since the beginning. As Americans swarmed the healthcare.gov website to purchase insurance the site continually crashed from the overload.
Since the administration had years to prepare the health insurance exchanges for the Oct. 1 rollout it is quite an embarrassment that they have performed so poorly since their debut. President Obama is expected to announce ways that the government is trying to remedy the situation including increasing staff at call centers that provide an alternative to healthcare.gov, according to the Associated Press.
"The president will directly address the technical problems with healthcare.gov - troubles that he and his team find unacceptable - and discuss the actions he has pushed for to make it easier for consumers to comparison shop and enroll for insurance while work continues around the clock to improve the website," a White House official told Reuters.
The Department of Health and Human Services released a memo on Sunday saying that they were using "tools and processes to aggressively monitor and identify parts of healthcare.gov where individuals are encountering errors or having difficulty using the site, so we can prioritize and fix them."
The main problem that people have encountered with the website is an inability to login despite registering. Some experts who have looked into the situation believe that the login problem is actually hiding some deeper problems with the website; problems that may require up to five million lines of code to be rewritten, according to the New York Times.
"The account creating and registration problems are masking the problems that will happen later," a person working on the repairs told the New York Times.
One positive thing for the Obama administration is that despite all of the problems that have been encountered so far it seems as if people are still attempting to purchase insurance through the exchanges, according to the New York Times.
"There's great demand for the affordable health care coverage made available by the Affordable Care Act," Jennifer Palmieri, the White House communications director, said. "The challenge for all of us - the state and federal governments and contractors alike - is to make sure the American people can access it simply. We don't rest until they can."
A live stream of President Obama's speech, scheduled for 11:25 a.m. ET, can be seen via C-Span at the following link.
