Amid HealthCare.gov glitches, feds extend insurance sign-up period

Americans who want to make sure they have health insurance coverage on the first day possible under the healthcare reform law will have eight more days to get their applications in.

With enrollment still obstructed by problems with the federal government's online portal, the extra time to get coverage that's effective Jan. 1 could be particularly welcome to consumers who have been denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions or unable to afford coverage without the law's income-based premium subsidies.

Meanwhile, the presidentially appointed troubleshooter for HealthCare.gov pledged that the site's carrying capacity for simultaneous users will be doubled by the end of the month.

Julie Bataille, director of the office of communications at the CMS, announced at the daily press call Friday that the final day for enrolling through the federal health insurance marketplace and ensuring coverage by New Year's Day had been pushed back from Dec. 15 to Dec. 23. Bataille cited the experience of Massachusetts when its Health Connector initiative was launched in the spring of 2007.

“We know that in Massachusetts that people visited the website three to six times before enrolling in a plan,” Bataille said. With new insurance shoppers on the federal website, “we want to give them time to make their decisions.”

Bataille said the government site developers have been “in ongoing conversations with insurers” to ensure consumers could have coverage by Jan. 1 while the insurers could handle the compressed time period between the final day of enrollment and the first day of coverage. After December, Bataille said, the lag period will revert, requiring applicants to have completed enrollment by the 15th of each subsequent month to obtain coverage by the first day of the following month.

Jeffrey Zients, whom President Barack Obama appointed to manage the rehabilitation of HealthCare.gov after its rocky start, repeated what has become the government's mantra about the effort: By the end of this month, “the vast majority of users will be able to use the site smoothly, and we're on target for that.”

Also by Nov. 30, Zients said, the site will be up and running at its “originally intended” capacity of 50,000 simultaneous uses, or by a “conservative estimate” it will be capable of handing more than 800,000 visitors a day. Currently, the site has a peak capacity of 25,000 simultaneous users, he said.

Response times—the average time it takes for a page to load on the site—is now less than 1 second while error rates, the frequency with which pages actions on the site fail to be carried our, are now down to 0.75%.

But Bataille said key parts of the website, the marketplace application where consumers can shop for health plans, and the federal data service hub, which connects applicants to various federal agencies to determine a buyer's eligibility and any subsidy payments, such as the Department of Homeland Security and the IRS, will be taken offline for upgrades for a substantial part of the upcoming weekend. The outages will take place starting at 9 p.m. ET Saturday and concluding at 9 a.m. ET Sunday.

Follow Joseph Conn on Twitter: @MHJConn