This Obama administration promise had an unusually short expiration date. Most of his promises string out over several months or several years. This one lasted just a few weeks.
The Obama administration’s HealthCare.gov adviser Jeffrey Zeints said on Friday that the trouble-plagued federal healthcare website is improving, but that higher volumes of visitors are exposing new capacity and software issues.
In a conference call with reporters, Zeints said progress this week has been marred by roadblocks. He described HealthCare.gov as being “a long way from where it needs to be.”
Both HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and White House spokesman Jay Carney have said this week that they hope the site will be working “for most people” by the end of the month, a climb down from the pledge to have it working for everyone by that time.
Once they get it fixed, the administration may run into yet another problem: Very few Americans who are on the individual insurance market have even bothered to check out Healthcare.gov.
Fewer than a quarter of all uninsured Americans have so far even attempted to visit an exchange site, according to a new Gallup poll.
As the Obama administration struggle to fix problems with the federal health exchange website, the poll found just 18 percent of the exchanges’ target audience – the nation’s uninsured – have tried to go to an ObamaCare site since it opened on Oct. 1.
Among those uninsured Americans who say they plan to eventually purchase insurance through the exchanges, a slightly higher percentage, 22 percent, say they have attempted to visit an exchange site.
These results undermine the Obama administration’s confidence in ObamaCare to reach its target audience.
Yeah, just a little bit.
Update: While they’re fixing things…
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