Obamacare Site Can Handle 17,000 People an Hour, CMS Says [View all]

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Source: Bloomberg

By Alex Wayne - Nov 5, 2013
The Obamacare health exchange is seeing improvement and can now register 17,000 customers per hour “with almost no errors,” said Marilyn Tavenner, the administrator responsible for the building of the website.

Fixes include speeding up the web pages so insurance plans are displayed “in just seconds,” instead of minutes, Tavenner, the head of the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said in prepared remarks at a Senate committee hearing today. The agency also doubled the number of servers and replaced a “virtual database” with a physical one.

“We are seeing improvements each week, and by the end of November, the experience on the site will be smooth for the vast majority of users,” Tavenner told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Her agency is doing a “series of software upgrades pretty much several times a week” and focusing on “the internal architecture of the site.”

That response wasn’t good enough for some Republicans on the committee, as well as Democrats who actually voted for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. Canceled policies, “sticker shock” on the price of new plans and website outages have shaken the faith of potential customers, said Senator Barbara Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat.

Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-05/obamacare-site-can-handle-17-000-people-an-hour-cms-says.html