Healthcare.gov now works for 80 percent of users after 400 fixes, administration says

Healthcare.gov, the error-riddled website where uninsured Americans are supposed to shop for health insurance, now works for "in the zone of 80 percent" of users, a White House official said. That's up from just 30 percent of users who were able to navigate through the entire site five weeks ago.

Officials say the site can now support its original goal of 50,000 concurrent users. "While we still have work to do, we have made significant progress with Healthcare.gov working for the vast majority of users," said Jeff Zients, who is leading the effort to repair Healthcare.gov. The improvement is the result of more than 400 software fixes and hardware upgrades, including a significant hardware upgrade on Nov 29 that roughly doubled the site's capacity. The error rate, which the government defines as system timeouts or failures, is now around .75 percent, down from more than 6 percent. Response times have been under a second for the last three weeks, down from eight seconds. It's all good news for users who have been trying to buy insurance through the site but were stopped by bugs and long wait times. But new data released by the White House also shows just how underprepared Healthcare.gov was when it launched.

(Dec 1)