The Obamacare website is now fixed.
At least that’s the word coming out of the White House over the last 24 hours, as an intensive repair effort has allowed the Obama administration to meet a self-imposed deadline to get healthcare.gov to “work smoothly for the vast majority of users” by the end of November.
“In effect, the administration gave itself a passing grade,” according to the New York Times.
That means the website is now working more than 90 percent of the time, up from 40 percent during some weeks in October.
In comments to the media, Jeffrey D. Zients, the head of the repair team, declared that consumers were having a much better experience now than in early October, meaning pages were now loading in less than a second, compared with an average of eight seconds in late October.
“The site is now stable and operating at its intended capacity, with greatly improved performance,” he said.
The administration released a “progress and performance report” summarizing the repair efforts. With the current site, 50,000 people can use the website simultaneously and pages fail to load well under 1 percent of the time, compared with more than 6 percent before the overhaul.
“Users spend an average of 20 to 30 minutes on the site,” the report said. “Based on usage trends, the site will support more than 800,000 consumer visits per day.”
But in the current gotcha environment, where the media and Republicans are desperate to find and broadcast every glitch, ABC News was quick to point out that the site isn’t perfect, noting that the report implies that the website continues to experience unscheduled outages at least 5 percent of the time. In addition, ABC said, officials are still concerned about slow-downs during high traffic periods.
On Saturday, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius wrote a blog post advising consumers to visit the site at off-peak times — mornings, nights and weekends — to avoid delays and potential congestion.
