The HealthCare.gov site went down for a considerable amount of time on Saturday morning.
Only hours before the deadline imposed by the Obama administration, itself, for having the federal health insurance exchange website up and running for the “vast majority” of the people who want to use, it the site went down for a huge amount of time early in the morning on Saturday.
The official report said that the site was being taken down deliberately for 11 hours.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services took the federal health insurance exchange website down for a massive 11 hour period early on Saturday morning. It finally returned to life, once more, at 8am (EST). With only a few hours left before the deadline to ensure that the website is primarily functional for most people, this was a very long downtime and caused a lot of raised eyebrows.
It is not yet clear whether the federal health insurance exchange shutdown should be considered a setback.
On the typical day, the site is down for a total of about an hour. This latest shutdown represented 7 hours more than that, at a time that is very close to the Obama administration’s own deadline for having the site functioning far better than it has been since its rocky start at the beginning of October. Although this could have represented a vital time in which many fixes were being put into place, this action occurred extremely close to the government’s high stakes deadline that they have clearly been scrambling to meet.
The portal has been promised to be fully functional, for the most part, to be able to enroll approximately 7 million people who are currently uninsured or who are under-insured. This is their primary resource for ensuring that they will comply with the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act.
All eyes are now on the federal health insurance exchange website to see whether or not this second attempt, after a disastrous first nine weeks – will be adequate to satisfy the needs of the Americans that it was designed to serve, and to make sure that it will be possible for people to comply with the new healthcare law’s requirements.