20% unable to enroll for US insurance

One in five Americans who want healthcare plans through the new federal insurance marketplace may be unable to sign up online by the March 1 deadline, officials said.

The Obama administration originally expected that 80 percent of people going to healthcare.gov should manage to enroll electronically, The Washington Post reported Sunday, but this was an internal goal that had not been made public.

President Barack Obama has been under rising pressure – after he began to implement his controversial healthcare law that came to be known as Obamacare – from both Republicans and fellow Democrats over the technical problems of the website.

CGI Federal, the lead contractor on the dysfunctional website, is filled with executives from a company that mishandled at least 20 other government IT projects, the Post said, citing documents and interviews.

In the past two decades, the company has been awarded contracts with at least 25 federal agencies worth $2.3 billion, the newspaper said.

The Obama administration acknowledges that until recently, it had no concrete definition for how well healthcare.gov should work, but officials say one would not have made sense before the site went live on Oct. 1.

Even if the Obama administration meets a Nov. 30 deadline for fixing the website�™s technical glitches, the report said, at least 20 percent of applicants will not be able to enroll. This 20 percent are expected to fall into three groups, according to the newspaper: people whose family circumstances are so complicated that the website cannot determine their eligibility for subsidies to help pay for health plans; people uncomfortable buying insurance on a computer; and people who encounter technical problems on the website.

Administration officials say although the current load on the website is light, �œswings from good performance to bad performance have been frequent”.

ARA/ARA