Health and Human Services secretary Sylvia Burwell warned Monday that HealthCare.gov customers will still see some glitches this year, but swore the administration would be transparent about any problems.
“Something will happen. What we need to do is be transparent, be fast and get it fixed,” Burwell said at the Center for American Progress on Monday, according to The Hill.
Burwell’s drumming up publicity for HealthCare.gov ahead of the launch of the three-month open enrollment period on Saturday. The website was scheduled to release premium information and window shopping on Friday, just days after midterm elections, but the functionality was delayed until late Sunday evening. (RELATED: Now That The Election’s Over, You Can Check HealthCare.gov Prices)
The administration says that HealthCare.gov 2.0 will work much better than last year’s flub, but officials have been consistently preparing the public for smaller problems with the site.
“We will have things that won’t go right. We will have outages, we will have downtime,” Burwell warned. “Will we have challenges? Yes. But the experience is one, overall, that will be a positive one.”
The administration has increased the site’s capacity for traffic, shortened the application process and gave insurers several weeks to test the website themselves. But not much else is known about HealthCare.gov’s functionality, ironically, because there hasn’t been much transparency in the run-up to the second open enrollment period.
HHS instituted a confidentiality agreement for any insurers who tested the website before it goes live on Saturday — a new procedure the administration didn’t include last year.
And HHS took a hit from the GOP for failing to release premium costs before election day as well. Sen. Lamar Alexander protested that customers should have been allowed more time to plan for their premium costs. (RELATED: Admin Won’t Release Final HealthCare.gov Premiums Until After Elections)