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Tag: obamacare online enrollment

  • Obamacare Reaches One Million Signups

    It is almost the end of 2013, and I am sure that most of us are sick and tired of hearing about the Affordable Care Act (commonly known as “Obamacare”) with all of the woes that the registration website HealthCare.gov has encountered these past few months. Nevertheless, hope for Obamacare is in sight, because its registration count recently reached a remarkable milestone.

    According to Time Magazine, Obamacare reached a little under one million registrations within most of December alone. The reason why the registration count for Obamacare is this high is due to the recent repairs to the main registration website itself. With the Obamacare sign-up numbers being this high for December, the totals for the past few months have been on the upswing as well. In October, there were 27,000 registrants, and 137,000 in November, as observed by the Federal Health Care Marketplace.

    Even though one million registrations have been completed for Obamacare, President Barack Obama’s administration had hoped for a higher number to have been achieved by now. According to Time, the Obama administration had hoped that the number of registrants for Obamacare would have been at 3.3 million by the end of the year. The Obama administration is still hopeful, and if you are still interested in Obamacare and want to register, please be sure to sign up by January 1st.

    White House officials have yet to release the registration counts for the 14 states that manage their own healthcare exchanges; however, the Obama administrations remains optimistic and forecasts that 7 million Americans will register prior to the first-year open enrollment period that ends in March.

    With the registration numbers being so high, many Americans have already encountered success and benefits by registering with Obamacare, and have shared their experiences on Twitter.

    Image via HealthCare.gov

  • Obamacare Glitches: Enrollment Pain Blow to Program?

    Obamacare sign-ups opened up last Tuesday, despite the government shutdown caused by the bickering over that very law. Floods of the uninsured hit the sites healthcare.gov, as well as the “exhanges”, excited to start getting the health coverage that President Obama promised would be less than $100 per month for 60% of the population.

    However, according to AFP,many visitors were greeted with, “We have a lot of visitors on our site right now and we’re working to make your experience here better. Please wait here until we send you to the login page. Thanks for your patience!” and “Online enrollment is coming soon! Sign up to receive an email notification when it’s available.” or simply,“Connection Refused”.

    “Whether you are for or against Obamacare, everyone seems to agree the government really dropped the ball on this rollout,” said independent technology analyst Jeff Kagan.

    “This is one of the largest and most complex things we have ever done. Typically, a company launches a project like this in a city, then a few cities,” said Kagan. “They figure out what doesn’t work right and they fix it before they roll it out nationwide. Why the government thinks it doesn’t have to follow the same rules of common sense is a mystery.”

    That says it all, doesn’t it?

    Unfortunately the glitches are not only online. The 500 “navigators” that were supposed to help people sign up, are apparently, hiding in crevasses somewhere. According to the New York Post, at some locations, staffers weren’t even aware of the program, and many navigators were still being trained and unavailable for service during last week’s “rollout”.

    Hilariously, anticipating a week of chaos, some health-care providers simply postponed enrolling people. LIke when the movie ends, and you remain in your seat until the mad rush is over. Many voicemails were not even returned at listed numbers for their site’s navigators.

    In a twist of irony, navigators who did work said they were unable to enroll people online because they were locked out of the state site due to other computer snafus.

    So, will all of these mistakes deal a blow to the messy terrain that already is Obamacare? That remains to be seen, but I know a few republicans who have their fingers crossed.

    Image via youtube