The Obama administration offered few details Tuesday about the technical problems that locked consumers out of new health insurance marketplaces.
Officials from the Health and Human Services Department would not say how many people enrolled in coverage through healthcare.gov, the website for federally run insurance exchanges in 36 states.
The website was unavailable for most of the day, and technical issues also forced some state-based exchanges offline shortly after they launched Tuesday morning.
President Obama and HHS officials generally attributed the glitches to the volume of traffic healthcare.gov received. As of Tuesday afternoon, the site had recorded 2.8 million visitors just since 7 a.m.
“We think that’s a tremendous beginning to this program and we’re off to a good start,” said Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, deputy policy director of the office handling most of the healthcare implementation effort.
Obama and his administration have repeatedly warned that some “glitches” were inevitable when rolling out such a large, complex system. But heavy web traffic was the only specific problem they would identify Tuesday.
HHS spokespeople did not directly answer questions about whether any other technical issues were discovered and whether they had been resolved.
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