As the Obama administration's self-imposed target date nears, officials say they're still on track to ensure that HealthCare.gov runs smoothly for the vast majority of users by month's end.
But are they also downplaying expectations? The new bar for success and the deadline were first announced weeks ago by Jeffrey Zients—the soon-to-be director of the National Economic Council—who was brought in to oversee the website's improvement efforts.
Addressing state and local officials in a teleconference Tuesday, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said her department is definitely on track to have a “significantly different user experience” for people by the end of the month than they had Oct. 1.
It's a change of phrase that stood out just four days before the problem-ridden federal Web portal is supposed to be working for the “vast majority” (as officials have repeated daily for weeks) of users visiting the site.
An HHS spokesperson indicated in an e-mail that the department isn't redefining success and still plans to have the site running smoothly for most consumers by Nov. 30.
The secretary's comment came a day after Julie Bataille, director of the CMS' office of communications, told reporters that HealthCare.gov—which she said experienced another brief outage Monday—will have “intermittent” periods where the system is slow or unresponsive. That's because, she explained, the site's usage level is likely to exceed 800,000 users per day—another previously announced target from the administration.
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