The federal health insurance exchange portal for 36 states, HealthCare.gov, is broken. Not irreparably so, but not just because of huge volumes of traffic, as was reported in initial days. Nonetheless, people are still signing up, but not as much
online.
The number of visitors to the federal government's HealthCare.gov Web site plummeted 88 percent between Oct. 1 and Oct. 13, according to a new analysis of America's online use, while less than half of 1 percent of the site's visitors successfully enrolled for health insurance the first week. [...]
Based on a sample of two million users — or 1 percent of all online users in the U.S. — which Millward Brown Digital has permission to track, it suggests that the rush of traffic administration officials cited as the cause of the site's problems trailed off within a matter of days.
Of the 9.4 million unique visitors to the site during the launch's first week, according to the analysis, roughly a third attempted to register, and a third of that number—1.01 million—completed registration. Ultimately, roughly 36,000 Americans signed up for an insurance plan online, the report said.
The low enrollment numbers compared to unique visits is of course not a sign that the launch is a failure. People browse before they buy. The curious—and a gajillion political reporters and bloggers—visit just to see how it's all going to work. One problem that the site has had is that the site architecture forced visitors to register before they could browse: a dumb idea. That is in the process of being fixed, starting
last week, and the elements of a window-shopping experience are being added.
People have also been signing up the old-fashioned way, with a pen and paper. It's slow and it's a pain in the neck, but it is an alternative that's being used. At the same time, one million people have created accounts online, and have begun the process of registering and enrolling, which does help demonstrate the level of demand for health insurance in this country. And, so far anyway, a lot of that demand is coming from exactly where it needs to for the whole system to work: younger people.
The mess that is HealthCare.gov has got to be fixed, but there's a little bit of time for that to happen, until Dec. 15 which is the deadline for people to enroll to have their insurance on Jan. 1, 2014. Enrollment will be open through March. But it has to happen and the sooner the better. One of the primary dangers this website mess is creating is that people will become so discouraged by the process that they give up.