HealthCare.gov Fixes: Lost in Translation? - East Idaho News
News

HealthCare.gov Fixes: Lost in Translation?

  Published at

ABC 110713 HealthcareSite?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1383846969668HealthCare.gov(WASHINGTON) — Tried to log-in at HealthCare.gov lately?

Five weeks after the website’s troubled launch — after an announced “tech surge” to fix its glitches — and now, after President Obama said that “the website is already better than it was at the beginning of October,” programmers still haven’t fixed the most basic part of the user experience: getting into the exchange.

The garbled text seen in the screen shot above, taken Thursday morning, illustrates the depth of problems with the site’s software code.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has promised the website will be “optimally functional” for the “vast majority” of users in three short weeks. And Wednesday night, Obama claimed, “by the end of this month, we anticipate that it is going to be working the way it is supposed to.”

Officials with the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is overseeing the website fixes, said Wednesday they have been struggling simply to isolate the root causes of many of the technical problems. The issues were described as “sporadic, meaning that they don’t necessarily always happen at the same time to all users,” and that “it is very difficult to pinpoint issues when we are seeing the kinds of things that we are within the sporadic nature of the system.”

In her testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, Sebelius even appeared to ever so slightly tamper expectations of a full fix by Dec. 1, saying: “We’re not where we need to be. It’s a pretty aggressive schedule to get to the entire punch list by the end of November.”

Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio

SUBMIT A CORRECTION