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NBC News
Healthcare.gov
will work smoothly by end of November,
government pledges
by Maggie Fox
NBC News
The troubled
federal health insurance website will be fixed
by the end of November, giving uninsured Americans two weeks to get
signed up
in time to have health insurance by the earliest possible date,
officials
pledged Friday.
One of the main
government contractors, QSSI, has been
assigned to oversee the fix, says Jeff Zients, the newly appointed
chief White
House economic adviser who’s been tasked to fix the logjammed website.
“We are confident
that by the end of the November,
healthcare.gov will be smooth for the vast majority of users,” Zients
told
reporters on a conference call.
“Over the last week
we worked with a team of experts to
conduct an assessment of the overall state of the healthcare.gov site,"
Zients said. They lent "fresh eyes" to the problems plaguing the
site. “The system is getting better,” he added. “There is a lot of work
to do
but healthcare.gov is fixable.”
The website, which
was promoted as a kind of Travelocity.com
for buying health insurance, has been an embarrassment to the Obama
administration since it opened Oct. 1. Health and Human Services
Secretary
Kathleen Sebelius says she did not know it would be such a disaster.
“I didn't realize
it wouldn't be operating optimally before
the launch,” she told reporters while on a tour of East Austin Health
Center in
Austin, Texas, where she watched counselors help people struggling to
use the
website.
“We knew if we had
another six months, we’d probably test
further,” Sebelius added.
On Thursday,
several contractors, including QSSI, told a
House committee that the site wasn’t tested “end to end” until just two
weeks
before launch. They said they’d have preferred to have had months to
test it.
Republicans and
Democrats alike have been strongly critical
of the site, and Republicans have said they believe the problems
reflect
weaknesses in the entire health care overhaul called for by the 2010
Affordable
Care Act.
The administration
denies this and says the website, one of
the main pillars of the reforms called for under the law, is getting
better
every day. Eventually the administration hopes 7 million people who
currently
do not have any health insurance will use the site to buy it. Most
people will
likely qualify for heavy government subsidies to do so.
The law requires
just about everyone to have health
insurance of some sort by next year. Most people are covered by
insurance
provided by an employer; most people over 65 have Medicare. But about
15
percent of Americans have no health insurance at all. Some states are
expanding
Medicaid, the health insurance plan for people with low incomes, to
more adults
but many are not.
For the rest of
this article and more, go to NBC News
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