Covered California’s online enrollment system will be down over the weekend for installation and testing of new functionality.
The plan is to take down the enrollment side of coveredcalifornia.com at 8 p.m. Saturday. The outage could last until the early hours of Tuesday. (UPDATE: Covered California moved the outage to the next weekend, Nov. 22-25.)
Consumers seeking to get their health insurance squared away that weekend are out of luck, in other words. But the management of California’s Obamacare marketplace won’t be spreading the word in advance.
“You can imagine how some press would take that, shockingly,” Covered California CEO Peter Lee told the exchange’s board Oct. 24.
When pressed by a board member to provide some sort of notice to consumers, Lee held his ground:
“Our job is to brand Covered California, not the two days we’ll be down,” Lee said at the meeting. “We don’t do press releases” on shutdowns.”
“Partners” of Covered California such as its Obamacare health insurance carriers will be informed, Lee said.
“I’m not sure you’re right,” board member Paul Fearer replied. “Reporters will be blasting (the site) over that.”
The Affordable Care Act’s web site failures set off a national furor, much of the blame going to the unprepared federal Obamacare site.
Covered California’s site has been “up and running 90 percent of the time,” the site’s managers told the board at that meeting. The downtime has been restricted to evenings and weekends, the managers said, at low traffic periods. The uptime of 90 percent was “short of our goal but well on way of meeting that goal,” they said.
The Nov. 16 shutdown in California will be followed by a longer period of downtime at the beginning of the year.
The November shutdown is to launch employer signups for the small business healthcare program, SHOP, and financial management processes. It’s termed version 2.5 of the web site operating system.
The January shutdown is for integration of the Covered California system with the counties’ human services system, SAWS. That’s considered version 3.0.
Lee said the January shutdown may come before or after Jan. 1, “probably not for two days, maybe more.”
Lee said the shutdowns were a fact of life for his operation: “We are cost-effective, and we need to be down and then up again” instead of spending time and resources to ensure the site remains in operation 24/7.
“I never like to be closed,” Lee said.
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