.The White House released its progress report covering the frantic repairs done to the Healthcare.Gov website over the last few months, and the results are promising, if not perfect.
"The status of HealthCare.gov in October was marked by an unacceptable user experience," bluntly reads the opening line in the official report on the Obamacare fixes, written by the Department of Health and Human Services. The problems contributing to the unacceptable user experience: slow response times, unexplained error messages, and frequent outages. "For some weeks in the month of October, the site was down an estimated 60 percent of the time," the report says.
Which is why the report is more than happy to tell you Healthcare.Gov now works over 90% of the time, according to Jeffrey D. Zients, the Obama adviser leading the website repair effort, who spoke with reporters Sunday. The website still isn't perfect — it still crashes occasionally — but it's certainly working a lot more than before, according to Zientz:
...the average system response time is under 1 second; the error rate is "consistently well below 1 percent"; the online system is stable — not crashing — more than 90 percent of the time; as many as 50,000 shoppers can use the site at the same time, or up to 800,000 visits a day.
This is the administration's argument they followed through with the November 30 improvement promise. And they say as much in the last line of the report. "While we strive to innovate and improve our outreach and systems for reaching consumers, we believe we have met the goal of having a system that will work smoothly for the vast majority of users," the report says.
The report gets into these results in much more detail — with images and graphs and charts! — and shows just how drastically Healthcare.gov has turned around the last few months. The site still isn't perfect, and it's still a little unreliable, but now it's the little engine that can instead of the little engine that can't.
You can check out the whole report here: