Health care site ‘has not lived up to expectations,’ feds concede

The U.S. Health and Human Services Department is touting its achievements while promising to make signing up at healthcare.gov less frustrating.

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Now that the shutdown is over, federal employees are back at work, and the U.S. Health and Human Services Department is outlining how it will fix the site’s problems.

In a Sunday blog post, the department acknowledged that “the experience on HealthCare.gov has been frustrating for many Americans” and “has not lived up to the expectations of the American people.” The site has simply been overloaded, it says, with 19 million unique visits since the site opened Oct. 1.

The post continues:

Since launch, when we first recognized these issues, we have been working around the clock to make improvements. We have updated the site several times with new code that includes bug fixes that have greatly improved the HealthCare.gov experience. The initial wave of interest stressed the account service, resulting in many consumers experiencing trouble signing up, while those that were able to sign up sometimes had problems logging in.

HHS’ mea culpa was mixed with a bit of back-patting, too. For instance, the blog post notes that the HealthCare.gov site’s “data hub” feature, which helps determine eligibility for particular health plans, has been working.

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