Americans trying to gain insurance coverage through HealthCare.gov are being placed in online "waiting rooms" to avoid crashing the sign-up system, reports The Wall Street Journal.
Here are six things to know about the issue.
1. The enrollee holding areas, which are used when the website's capacity is stretched, were designed by Helalthcare.gov engineers to control the number and type of transactions on the site at moments of particularly high volume, in a process sometimes called "throttling," according to the report.
2. The online waiting rooms have been used regularly since the fourth open enrollment period began last Tuesday, according to The Wall Street Journal.
3. However, the waiting rooms are typically not used until later in the open enrollment period, which runs through Jan. 31. "Last season, we encountered these types of delays around the Dec. 15 and Jan. 31 deadlines, but not this early in the season. The delays felt rather constant during the first week," Elizabeth Colvin, director of Insure Central Texas, a major enrollment group serving the Dallas area, told The Wall Street Journal.
4. CMS officials told The Wall Street Journal Monday the waiting rooms had been used periodically but did not agree that it had been constant. They told the publication that for the past few days they saw an intermittent issue with one component of HealthCare.gov that had affected the website and that teams had identified the problem. They expected the issue would be resolved in the coming days.
5. The waiting rooms essentially block insurance sign-ups at the point where the would-be enrollee would otherwise log into their accounts or create new ones, according to the report. The holding areas don't affect website browsers.
6. More than 500,000 applications had been submitted in the first four days of open enrollment this year, according to CMS, and 1.15 million applications were submitted in the first seven days last year.
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