The Obamacare site is crashing for millions of Americans, and a report this week said it could take weeks to fix.
The New York Times reported this week that fixes to Healthcare.gov, the main insurance marketplace for the Affordable Care Act, could take between two weeks and two months to fix glitches, as only a small amount of people have been able to successfully sign up for health insurance.
A source close to the matter told the paper: “I’ve heard as little as two weeks or as much as a couple of months.”
The person said that the project was around 70 percent working.
Others told the paper that fixes to the website were causing problems.
“The extent of the problems is pretty enormous. At the end of our calls, people say, ‘It’s awful, just awful,'” an insurance executive said.
The Times article comes after the Wall Street Journal, via Forbes, reported that the U.S. Health and Human Services agency has deliberately implemented a bug to cause the site to crash. The Healthcare.gov website forces a person to register for an account to enter personal information.
As a result, the report says, there is a large traffic bottleneck while the government verifies your information. The Journal reported that HHS were aware of the issue, but they were more afraid that people would see the underlying cost.
“Healthcare.gov was initially going to include an option to browse before registering,” Christopher Weaver and Louise Radnofsky with the Wall Street Journal wrote. “But that tool was delayed, people familiar with the situation said.”
They added: “An HHS spokeswoman said the agency wanted to ensure that users were aware of their eligibility for subsidies that could help pay for coverage, before they started seeing the prices of policies.”
