As many parts of the United States government grinded to a halting shutdown, major provisions of President Barack Obama’s health care law moved forward despite attempts by House Republicans to block it.
Health insurance marketplaces, one of the core provisions of the Affordable Care Act, opened Tuesday morning to all Americans.
Federal officials are optimistic about the already heavy traffic to the virtual marketplace at the website healthcare.gov.
More than 2.8 million people have visited the website since midnight, and around seven times as many people were on the site as were ever on Medicaid.gov at one time, said Marilyn Tavenner, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, on a conference call with reporters.
“That gives you a sense of how important that is to millions of Americans around the country,” Obama said in a speech Tuesday afternoon from the Rose Garden. “We’re going to be speeding this thing up in the next couple hours to handle all this demand that exceeds anything we had expected.”
Government officials were not willing to release the current number of people who have enrolled in the system or purchased health insurance, though some states running their own marketplaces have done so.
“It takes some time to pull information and data,” Tavenner said.
But amid massive web traffic and despite government confidence, some states, such as Hawaii, Maryland, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Iowa reported issues with the federal site.
Those operating Healthcare.gov at the time of publishing had received more than 81,000 calls and 60,000 requests for a webchat navigating the system, Tavenner said.
Obama compared initial glitches in the health care exchanges to ones in Apple’s iOS 7 operating system in his speech.
“Within days they found a glitch, so they fixed it,” Obama said. “I don’t remember anybody suggesting Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads, or threatening to shutdown the company if they didn’t.”
The Mitt Romney-backed Massachusetts Health Care Connector, which opened in 2006, serves as somewhat of an indicator as to how people interact with the exchanges, Tavenner said.
“From what we know from Massachusetts, people tend to check out their options before they sign up for coverage,” Tavenner said.
Now that these exchanges are open, users will have an average of 53 different plans to choose from, according to a release from the Department of Health and Human Services.
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