The marketplace websites were not expected to be used as heavily as they have been from the start, causing a rocky beginning.
Following extensive surveys and studies that indicated that the majority of Americans hadn’t even heard of the health insurance exchanges, it wasn’t entirely expected that they would arrive by the millions on these various state marketplace websites to enroll and shop for the coverage that they will require in order to comply with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
Though these millions of people are keen to register, many have found themselves in a virtual “waiting room”.
The websites have been discovered to be riddled with glitches that are stopping some people from being able to sign up. Many believe that it is primarily a matter of extremely high traffic volumes that are causing the health insurance exchange websites to underperform. The websites have been up and running – so to speak – since October 1, 2013 – but some are still struggling on certain levels.
Some have suggested that the Republican controversy has managed to raise awareness about the health insurance marketplaces.
They have indicated that even before the broadest marketing efforts for the health insurance exchanges began, the fanfare and controversy that arose with the dramatic debate and then shut down of part of the federal government helped millions of additional people to learn about the exchanges and how they were affected by them. This, they suggest, has caused many more people to visit the sites and sign on in order to be able to comparison shop for coverage.
Among the millions of Americans who did go to healthcare.gov or to the individual websites run by the states, some received blank pages, error messages, or even crashes, but many others seemed to have no problem whatsoever in completing their applications forms to be able to obtain health insurance coverage. Though this does mean that many people were served exactly as expected, it has left a large number of people frustrated and confused about how they should proceed.
These health insurance marketplaces launched on the exact same day that the federal government was shut down due to a Congress based deadlock regarding a spending bill.
