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As a small coterie of grim-faced advisers shuffled into the Oval Office on the evening of Oct. 15, President Obama’s chief domestic accomplishment was falling apart 24 miles away, at a bustling high-tech data center in suburban Virginia. HealthCare.gov, the $630 million online insurance marketplace, was a disaster after it went live on Oct. 1, with a roster of engineering repairs that would eventually swell to more than 600 items. The private contractors who built it were pointing fingers at one another. And inside the White House, after initially saying too much traffic was to blame, Mr. Obama’s closest confidants...

Obama administration officials said Saturday they were "on track" to have the problematic ObamaCare website running smoothly by their self-imposed Nov. 30 deadline. "With the scheduled upgrades last night and tonight, we're on track to meet our stated goal for the site to work for the vast majority of users," Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services spokesman Aaron Albright told Fox News, in a statement. Administration officials have since announcing the deadline qualified expectations and outcomes by repeatedly saying the site would work for the “vast majority of people.” The Washington Post earlier Saturday reported the administration was prepared to...

Well, I guess it beats explaining why the Obama administration failed to meet yet another of its deadlines in getting a 42-month web-portal project to work. According to the Washington Post, the White House will announce tomorrow that the Healthcare.gov site has been fixed, even though the site won’t actually be fixed — not even by the administration’s own metrics: Administration officials are preparing to announce Sunday that they have met their Saturday deadline for improving HealthCare.gov, according to government officials, in part by expanding the site’s capacity so that it can handle 50,000 users at once. But they have...

**SNIP** Some of the vacuum in support and implementation of the act has been filled by community groups. "The glitches have not prohibited one ounce of enrollment in the African American community," says Barbara Williams-Skinner, co-chair of the National African American Clergy Network, which says it has reached out to 5,000 pastors across the country to promote enrollment under the act. Williams-Skinner says the network has focused its efforts on 13 states with the largest share of the 7 million African Americans without health insurance. For many in that demographic, problems with computer enrollments haven't been very relevant. "Many in...

Remember, the administration is counting people who've selected plans through Healthcare.gov and placed them in virtual shopping carts as "enrollments," so this metric is both overly generous and quite misleading. To be fully enrolled, consumers need to select plans, receive confirmation from insurers, and make their first premium payment. To be covered by the first of the year, consumers must complete that end-to-end process within the next few weeks. Obamacare's website is working better on the front end -- although problems still persist -- but it's not "fixed" by any stretch. Back end flaws could create migrane-inducing backlogs on...

Two months after the disastrous launch, administration officials said on Sunday they had met their goal of getting the HealthCare.gov site running smoothly but warned that it needs more fixes. Officials also acknowledged that the site may not operate smoothly.

Some people who have managed to complete the burdensome and glitch-filled process of signing up for Obamacare are learning they are not really enrolled at all. "Obama administration officials acknowledged today that some of the roughly 126,000 Americans who completed the torturous online enrollment process in October and November might not be officially signed up with their selected issuer, even if the website has told them they are."

The new and improved Obamacare website struggled under heavy traffic loads on Monday, but still appeared to operate pretty much as the Obama administration has promised: Okay, but not perfect. After a weekend of final, intensive fixes, officials unveiled a somewhat repaired HealthCare.gov on Sunday and promised that it will work well enough to serve the Americans who want insurance exchange coverage by New Year’s.

Weeks of frantic technical work appear to have made the government's health care website easier for consumers to use. But that does not mean everyone who signs up for insurance can enroll in a health plan. The problem is that so-called back end systems, which are supposed to deliver consumer information to insurers, still have not been fixed. And with coverage for many people scheduled to begin in just 30 days, insurers are worried the repairs may not be completed in time. ''Until the enrollment process is working from end to end, many consumers will not be able to enroll...

The flagship Obamacare website continued to spout error messages on Monday, hobbling a new fix that the White House bragged would avoid system crashes caused by too much Web traffic. Frustrated with news reports about crashes, delays and other online failures, the Obama administration´s ´tech surge´ team put in place an email-driven ´queuing system´ similar to the overdraft feature available with some checking accounts. [Snip] ´Can´t wait?´ the message reads. ´Leave your email with us, and we´ll send you a one-time message when HealthCare.gov is ready for you to return.´ This page, too, was prone to crash on Monday, at

It could take a year to secure the risk of "high exposures" of personal information on the federal Obamacare online exchange, a cybersecurity expert told CNBC on Monday. "When you develop a website, you develop it with security in mind. And it doesn't appear to have happened this time," said David Kennedy, a so-called "white hat" hacker who tests online security by breaching websites. He testified on Capitol Hill about the flaws of HealthCare.gov last week. "It's really hard to go back and fix the security around it because security wasn't built into it," said Kennedy, chief executive of TrustedSec....

Tick tock. After a glowing news conference yesterday citing “night and day” progress on HealthCare.gov, I decided to log in this morning and take the Web site for a test drive, as I’m sure many others are doing. Early reports had been promising. What I found was hardly encouraging — long delays loading pages, an endless circle of tasks (some already completed) and ultimately an error message. The load-time issues (sometimes more than a minute) reminded me of the problems users encountered in the very first days of the Web site, which handles health insurance enrollment for residents of 36...

“Healthcare.gov on Dec. 1 is night and day from where it was on Oct. 1,” Jeff Zients, who was brought in to oversee fixes to the troubled Obamacare website, declared during a Sunday conference call. But that statement says more about how badly the website was functioning on its launch date than it says about how well the site is functioning now. Starting in late October, Zients declared that the website, which is supposed to enable residents of 36 states to sign up for insurance through President Obama's health care law, would be functional for a “vast majority” of users...

HHS touts other measures of progress—four times as much of this, doubled capacity of that—without revealing the original base. They've fixed those 400 bugs but won't say what they are or how many there are in total. Such statistical ploys are like a business claiming its revenues are twice as high as the last quarter's, in order to avoid saying if it's profitable. Our favorite line in the report is the HHS boast that "the team is operating with private sector velocity and effectiveness." That sure is a remarkable two-month turnaround for the same team that took three and half...

Weeks of frantic technical work appear to have made the government's health care website easier for consumers to use. But that does not mean everyone who signs up for insurance can enroll in a health plan. The problem is that so-called back end systems, which are supposed to deliver consumer information to insurers, still have not been fixed. And with coverage for many people scheduled to begin in just 30 days, insurers are worried the repairs may not be completed in time. ''Until the enrollment process is working from end to end, many consumers will not be able to enroll...

According to Fox News Sunday, the new Healthcare.gov site has not quite achieved the promised “fully functional” status by the November 30th deadline. In fact, the site still can’t verify identities for potential enrollees, which means that consumers can’t be sure they’re seeing the right information for coverage options. After forty-two months of development and nine weeks of futility and failure, this isn’t exactly a confidence-builder (via The Weekly Standard): CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO “Federal officials promised that healthcare.gov would work smoothly for a vast majority of users starting today. But that has not been the case so...

Obama administration officials, racing to beat a month-end deadline to fix the troubled federal insurance website, said Sunday there has been "dramatic progress" in patching HealthCare.gov but acknowledged "there is more work to be done" in improving the site and its underlying technology. An eight-page report released Sunday morning by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services officials offered a few details of progress in fixing the site, which crashed shortly after its launch Oct. 1.

The Obama administration promised the healthcare.gov website would be fixed by today. The Obamacare reboot began with 11-hour website shutdown. That’s not all… Unfortunately there are still bugs and glitches. CNN reported this morning the website crashes during the signup process. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59VTIDjKDZ4

The Obama administration claimed victory Sunday for making HealthCare.gov workable for the vast majority of users, a standard that will be tested as millions of people flood the site in the next three weeks. Sunday marked the passage of the administration's self-imposed deadline for fixing the broken ObamaCare enrollment website, which serves consumers in 36 states. The agency that oversees HealthCare.gov said "we believe we have met the goal" of making the system navigable for most people, but cautioned that more fixes lie ahead. "Dramatic progress has been made," the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) stated in a...