Last night while surfing through Facebook, I noticed that a
former classmate had posted about getting enrolled in health insurance. In reading through the comments to the post,
I found that others got enrolled yesterday as well. I couldn’t figure out why the sudden interest
in trying to enroll again. Then, it
dawned on me.
Today is December 2.
The Obama Administration said that healthcare.gov would be working for
the majority of people by yesterday.
Many have doubted this.
Fixes
The administration claims that it has met this goal. It claims that the Web site is working 90% of
the time as compared to 43% back when enrollment opened on October 1.
Lags in time can still be a problem, however, and those
working on the fixes admit that they would like to get the site’s response time
down to half a second.
They also are unsure if the Web site can now handle 50,000
people at one time. They won’t know
until that many try to access it at once.
Successes
Back to my former classmate, it took her a little under an
hour to enroll. For her friends, it took
about a half hour on average. These
times are back on track with the estimated time pre-enrollment opening.
By the way, all of these enrollees are healthy young adults
in their 20s. They are helping to even
out the pool and can help balance insurance costs.
They all found cheaper plans than what they were previously paying. After subsidies, one person will be paying $40/ month.
They will have coverage beginning January 1. If you enroll by December 23 (and make your
first payment by December 30), you can too!
My organization’s Certified Application Counselor is
planning to have an enrollment session at our office on Wednesday. I will update you all on the successes and failures
of it. Will we have access to complete
the entire enrollment process? How long
will it take on average? What types of
glitches are still present?
I am hopeful, and I think it can only get better in the next
three months before the enrollment period ends.
Let’s attempt to get covered again America!
