On the very last day for purchasing plans for this year, down went the site once again.
As though the desperate scramble from having waited until the very last minute to purchase a health insurance plan wasn’t stressful enough, the federal exchange site failed, causing many to receive a message that it was “currently unavailable.”
This was quite the inconvenient time for the site to stop working, as many faced a midnight deadline.
Although the health insurance marketplace, Healthcare.gov, had a rocky start, after the massive renovations that were applied to it throughout November, it has been functioning relatively well…until the last day in which Americans could purchase their plans before they would risk facing a tax penalty. The site went down for a number of hours on Monday morning, causing the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to release a statement that the “tech team is working now to bring the system online as soon as possible.”
That message was hardly comforting to people who waited until the last day to buy health insurance.
The site later became operational, once more, but the flood of users who were trying to comply with the health care reform at the last moment found themselves in a “queue”. This meant that they couldn’t proceed directly into the site but instead had to wait until they received an email that would advise them that they could now access the site to complete their enrollments.
The HHS also mentioned that consumers were still able to complete their enrollments by phoning the call center, and that “The federal data services hub is working normally.” Despite the fact that the health care reform was created in order to help to promote access to medical services, it is sure that it has been causing anxiety, stress, and blood pressure levels to rise – particularly on that last day before the midnight deadline.
Over the last few days before March 31 – the final day in which consumers could purchase their health insurance plans to comply with the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate for 2014 – there was a sharp rise in the number of users of the insurance exchange websites. In fact, the federal government has stated that by the week before the deadline, about 6 million people had applied for their coverage.
