HealthCare.gov is now up and running, giving customers just five days to check premium prices before the open enrollment period begins Saturday.
The updated website was supposed to launch Friday for window shopping only, but was delayed until late Sunday night. Customers can browse plans, look at prices and estimate their premium subsidies, but can’t purchase a plan until open enrollment begins Nov. 15 and lasts just three months — half the length of last year’s.
Health and Human Services principal deputy administrator Andy Slavitt told reporters Sunday that the window shopping function “has been ready for a while,” but the administration chose not to launch it until now.
“Obviously we’ve been continuing to test it,” Slavitt said.
HHS is reportedly confident that HealthCare.gov will work well this enrollment period, but Slavitt still maintained that “things will not be perfect.” The agency is making contingency plans in case the website doesn’t perform as well as expected, The Washington Post reports.
HHS is developing a “throttling” system, according to one document, that will send people into separate “waiting rooms” if too many people try to use the HealthCare.gov at once and overwhelm the site’s new capacity. It’s an updated version of the queue system the agency came up with last fall during the “tech surge” when the website was unable to handle increased traffic.
Other confidential documents show that CMS is behind on sending notices to last year’s Obamacare sign-ups about their subsidy eligibility for 2015. Fewer than one million of 7.6 million total notices were ready to be mailed or emailed by late October, although customers were supposed to have the information by Nov. 1.
A computer problem made it difficult to send email notices to some customers, according to The Washington Post. It’s been fixed and customers should get their information by Nov. 15, again leaving customers little time to plan.
But most details about whether HealthCare.gov is as new and improved as HHS hopes won’t be available until launch day — the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services forced insurers to sign a confidentiality agreement keeping them mum on any glitches, which wasn’t required last year for the brief 10-day testing period. (RELATED: Admin Forces Insurers To Keep Quiet About HealthCare.gov Problems)