Obamacare Issue Resolved by End of November on Website: Administration

The poorly functioning Obamacare website issues should be resolved and the site able to help Americans purchase health insurance coverage by the end of November, the administration says.

After testing and exploring the website thoroughly, the Obama administration said there were “dozens of complex problems,” The Associated Press reports, and identified a private company, QSSI, that would be in charge of fixing the site.

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"By the end of November, healthcare.gov will work smoothly for the vast majority of users,” consultant Jeffrey Zients told The Guardian. "The healthcare.gov site is fixable. It will take a lot of work, and there are a lot of problems that need to be addressed."

A consultant working with the White House on fixing the site, which has crashed numerous times and been the focus of complaints from people attempting to buy health insurance, Zients told the Guardian the 14.6 million people who logged onto the site in the first days it was up and running triggered initial issues.

But problems continued, and programming issues caused the site to freeze and send out error messages.

"These are bugs that prevent the software from performing the way it's supposed to work," Zients told the Guardian. "There's a punch list of fixes, and we're going to punch them out one by one."

News of how long it may take to fix the website comes as some lawmakers are pushing to extend open enrollment for health insurance, the Guardian said. Ten Democratic senators wrote Obama with their opinion the rollout should be delayed, Bloomberg News said.

Last week, Republicans said government officials knew there were considerable problems with the website but launched it anyway. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is coming under fire and will testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee Wednesday.

Sebelius said the software would have been tested more extensively “in an ideal world,” Bloomberg said. She also said delaying enrollment could cause problems for insurance companies.

“We would have to have a serious understanding with our insurance partners because until they know who is enrolled they really can’t even submit a bid for next year,” Sebelius said at a news conference, Bloomberg reported.

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