Administration officials have been giving daily updates on the progress of fixes, beginning the day last week when lawmakers grilled the website's various contractors in the first of a series of congressional hearings on the troubled launch.
CMS Administrator Marilynn Tavenner is scheduled to appear before the House Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday, and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is lined up for the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, Bataille said, the agency's team has reconfigured certain components of the site to increase responsiveness and also resolved how eligibility notices are presented to consumers. As consumers make their way through the website and complete their applications, they eventually view an eligibility page. Previously, that page had been showing a blank screen, Bataille said. It is now displayed properly.
She also noted that Verizon Terremark—the company that operates the data center that hosts HealthCare.gov and the data services hub and experienced a network failure—resolved its Sunday night outage and the data hub was back up and running by 7 a.m. Monday.
Looking ahead, Bataille said it would be “premature” to report on what other issues fall on the punch list of problems that Jeffrey Zients, former acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, announced in a call with reporters Friday. Bataille said she expects to articulate over time what problems have been fixed, and she reiterated that the administration expects a majority of users to have a smooth enrollment process by late November. And while she would not specify what metrics or benchmarks the agency will use to determine if it's on track, she said that generally those will be issues that have to do with improving the overall consumer experience, such as having pages load more quickly and users receiving fewer error messages and timeouts in the process.
Bataille also indicated that the Spanish language version of the site—which the Obama administration previously intended to launch a few weeks after the start of open enrollment—will not be available until late November. About 45,000 consumers seeking enrollment have called the federal government's call centers in Spanish or another language, Bataille said.
Follow Jessica Zigmond on Twitter: @MHjzigmond
