Obamacare web crashes continue to make national news, but Covered California seems to be reliably online and in business.
More than 600,000 unique visits were logged on its web site the week ending Oct. 12, the second week of operation for the state health insurance exchange.
That adds up to more than 1.5 million unique visitors since the Oct. 1 launch of the Obamacare outpost. That’s a healthy number, but far short of the reported 5 million visits mistakenly attributed to the Covered California web site on day 1.
The service centers handled just short of 105,000 inquires, Covered California said in its weekly report Oct. 15. The average wait time was greatly reduced, from 15 minutes (in the opening days’ crush) to a bit under 2 minutes. The “handling time” was 14 1/2 minutes.
“From Oct. 1 through Oct. 12, more than approximately 94,500 applications were started,” Covered California reported.
It did not report on the number completed, as in week 1, but the number is assumed to be low as consumers check out their options and comparison shop. Covered California announced first-week signups of 16,311 households.
Total enrollment for October will be released in November, officials said.
One feature of the Covered California web site that remains MIA is the search for specific physicians and medical facilities associated with the health plans on offer. Officials had said the physician search would be offered on the California web site in the second week. It debuted, but was removed after complaints from physicians about inaccuracies.
The L.A. Times reported: “The state took the provider search tool offline Oct. 9, and an exchange spokeswoman said it’s expected to return soon after improvements are made.”
The lack of information about doctors affiliated with health insurance networks almost certainly is having an effect on enrollments.
The federal Obamacare site, HealthCare.gov, received 14.6 million unique visits in the first 11 days of operation, a HHS spokeswoman said.
Complaints about the site’s ineffectiveness and clumsiness are legion. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said: “They were overwhelmed by the traffic. OK, but now let’s see how long it’s going to take to have that be fixed.” Pelosi was a key player in creation of the Affordable Care Act.
The Internet tracking outfit Millward Brown Digital said only 36,000 people signed up for insurance plans via the federal site, but did not say how it arrived at that number, which was disputed by federal officials.
California’s site managed to reach 2.8 percent of state residents in its first week, Millward Brown said. That percentage was slightly below average, with states such as Vermont, Oregon, Minnesota, Washington posting far better numbers. The federal site reached .9 percent of Americans, the traffic trackers said.
“The 16 operational state-run exchanges combined to attract over 3.1 million visitors (in week 1 of the health exchanges),” the traffic service said. “In total, 11.3 million consumers visited the federal and state exchanges during their first week of operation.”
Covered California said 279 enrollment counselors are now helping would-be Obamacare subscribers. It did not release statistics for the small-business program known as SHOP.
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