Healthcare.gov Websites Experienced 'Glitches' on Launch Day Due to Heavy Volume
The online market places created under the Affordable Care Act opened on Tuesday, but users were met with error messages and long wait times as volume bogged down the website's servers.
The healthcare exchanges online hub, HealthCare.Gov, went live at 8 a.m. ET Tuesday but several different state exchanges experienced long waiting periods and people trying to register on the login page were greeted with a message: "Please wait."
"We're likely to have some glitches," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told reporters Monday. "We will fix them and move on. Is this a sign that the law is flawed and failed? I don't think so."
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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 the website ThinkProgress, previously wrote.
