Obamacare Site Crashes, Leaving Millions Unable to Use Healthcare Exchanges
The first day people were allowed to sign up for health insurance using the health care exchanges were met will widespread problems for users that was due, in part, to the number of people searching the site, healthcare.gov.
Numerous reports stated that roughly 3 million people had visited the healthcare.gov website, Medicare administrator Marilyn Tavenner, whose office is overseeing the introduction of the Affordable Care Act, told NBC.
One of the more problematic issues that arose other than slow websites was the difficulty that many users experienced in trying to set up accounts.
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"If you can't set up an account ... you can't enroll," Brett Graham, of Leavitt Partners, a consulting firm run by former Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt.
Still, others were expecting some problems with the roll-out but are confident that over time workers will be able to correct those issues.
"Today is the start of preseason," Katie League, an outreach and enrollment manager at Health Care for the Homeless in Baltimore, told CBS. "You know, not every quarterback is ready on the first day of preseason."
The ACA allows states to decide if they want the federal government to run the exchanges or if they would rather run the exchanges themselves. However, states forgoing participating in the exchanges will miss out on hundreds of millions of federal dollars.
There are 25 states who have declared that they will opt out of the health care exchanges, which will shift the burden of subsidizing insurance for those states' uninsured residents to the taxpayers, given that those who are not covered by Medicaid expansion will in many cases be eligible for maximum cost assistance when purchasing insurance on the exchange.
Ultimately, those opposed to the ACA deem it an abuse of federal power and something that the country simply cannot afford to go through with.
"We look at the law as being unconstitutional because it's a government takeover of health care, so we want to make it difficult for the law to function as its proponents want it to," Twila Brase, president and co-founder of Citizens' Council for Health Freedom, said in a statement.
While opponents express their concerns in relation to the ACA, proponents of the law are focused on providing affordable health insurance to millions of currently uninsured Americans.
"Obamacare will provide millions of families with large tax credits to help make health care more affordable for them, and the penalty will only be leveled against those Americans who choose not to purchase insurance even though they are able to afford it," Tara Culp-Ressler of ThinkProgress, previously wrote.
