November 18, 2014
Following last year’s launch of the Affordable Care Act’s open enrollment period, all eyes were on the start of this year’s open enrollment period. About 100,000 people submitted their health insurance applications on November 15, the first day people could do so under the ACA this year. Sylvia Mathews, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, said that so far, the relaunch has gone quite a bit better than it did a year ago.
“The vast majority of people visiting the site were able to log in and do what they intended to do,” Burwell said, according to The Wall Street Journal. In addition to the 100,000 people who actually submitted their applications, another 500,000 logged onto the site and browsed for potential insurance coverage.
While those numbers were impressive, it stands to reason that the more impressive figures were those of people who reported having significant trouble accessing the site and navigating it. While the number is probably not zero, there do not appear to have been any significant spikes in the number of people experiencing basic problems. That’s a huge win for the administration and people looking for insurance. While many of the problems have arisen at the federal level, state healthcare exchanges have faced their own set of challenges. States like [state name] had been working around the clock in the lead-up to the relaunch to ensure their call centers and exchanges were up and running.
The government said that if there were any login issues, most of them stemmed from people who had not reset their passwords earlier this year. When the Heartbleed vulnerability was an issue this summer, the website had told users they would need to choose a new password. Those who didn’t had their passwords deleted and would have had trouble accessing the site on Saturday. Other than that, the Obama administration is keeping its fingers crossed and hoping that this year’s launch will indeed continue to go smoothly.
