December Week 2 – How Good is the Federal Marketplace Now?

With 2 months and 2 weeks after the setup of Obama’s health insurance platform, the troubles of the administration have not fully ceased. The original setup date of Obama’s fabled marketplaces, October 1, brought more troubles than laurels for the administration. The healthcare.gov website, purportedly the Obamacare evangelist, did not perform as intended and decimated the whole plan of getting 7 million to enroll before March 1, the official end date of the enrollment period. To tackle this shameful failure, the administration promised to meet its numbers and get a fully functional website by the end of November. Now, with the action moving into the first few weeks of December, let’s take a look at how the federal health insurance quoting engine is performing.

1) First, let’s start with the good news. The enrollment numbers have picked up and it seems that the federal health insurance quoting software is working exactly like it should be. The pace of enrollment has more than doubled across American and the enrollment numbers coming in show a fourfold increase in the number of enrollments in the first 2 months. The traffic on the website has continued to grow, and a major achievement for the administration lies in the fact that the federal health insurance sales automation software is able to handle that sudden increase in site usage. In the first couple of days, the site attracted 800,000 visitors, a mammoth number.

2) Americans have till December 23rd to enroll with the system and get covered under Obamacare compliant health insurance plans. With the site performance metrics and stability showing strong positive signs, it seems that the administration will finally hit its enrollment numbers.

3) However, on the bad side, the original target of the administration was to enroll 500,000 by the end of October. This target was way off the mark, with the health insurance quoting engine managing only 365,000 enrollments by the end of November. There is still a long way to go in this regard, and the officials need to be ready for this.

4) The backend technical problems are another major deterrent in smooth functioning of health insurance quoting software. This backend is responsible for distributing enrollment information to insurance companies, and its failure means that enrollments are not really going through but getting stuck at the federal end. As of now, about 10% of enrollments are experiencing these errors. If you take a rough estimate of 100,000 enrollments in a day, which makes about 10,000 enrollments gone wrong. Naturally, in larger scheme of things, that is a bigger challenge.

In short, the federal marketplace is improving, but it is still quite far from the big promises made by the Obama administration prior to the rollout. Are we looking at big, fake promises, or are we stuck with inefficient means to reach those realistically achievable targets, only time will tell. For now, American is taking heart in the gradual improvements shown by its federal health insurance platform.

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