After President Obama and Health and Human Services Secretary Katherine Sebelius confessed to the failure of the October 1 rollout of Obamacare, they told Americans it would be all systems go for the Nov 30 re-launch. Apparently, all systems go for the Obama administration means that 80 percent of the users can successfully navigate the Healthcare.gov site.
The repeated mantra for the Obama administration is “vast majority” when referring to expectations and results for website users. After some of the latest developments, even “vast majority” may need to be softened.
In an inauspicious start, the Centers for Medicare and Medical Services (CMS) said the site will be down for an extended period on the first day of the re-launch and will not be available until Saturday at 8 AM. Also, technicians for the site said they will not be able to fix all the glitches by the deadline. CMS representative Julie Bataille cautioned, “If there are extraordinary high spikes in traffic, which exceed the site’s capacity, consumers will be put in a new advance queuing system that will give them an expected wait time, or allow them to be notified via email when they can return to the site.”
In addition, on Wednesday, Obama administration officials publicized that they would delay the launch of the online health insurance portal for small businesses until November 2015. Officials admitted that dealing with the multitude of issues surrounding Healthcare.gov allowed them no time to deal with the Small Business Health Options Program. Moreover, White House officials had to postpone enrollment deadlines for individuals to December 23rd and delayed penalties for businesses with less than 50 workers until 2015. On top of that, the White House postponed indefinitely the launch of the Spanish language sign-up function.
Party leaders will be paying close attention to the re-launch, knowing that the developments may determine the outcome of the upcoming midterm elections in 2014. Consequently, Republican strategy will be to associate all Democrats who supported Obamacare with its failures. On the other hand, Democrats will be preaching the merits of Obamacare and its success stories of “real people.”
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