Local Healthcare Navigators Weigh in on President’s Website Fixes

An error screen is a thing of the past, well for some anyway, thanks to the president’s recent round of fixes for controversial website healthcare dot gov.

Rae Bond, the Executive Director for the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Medical Society, says, "It’s been crashing less, so that’s a really great thing."

Bond oversees two healthcare navigators at the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Medical Society.

She says time and again people would get halfway through the enrollment process and the site would just crash.

Bond adds, "We are seeing increased functionality. It is moving faster and I think people are able to get further through the process."

White House officials say the site can now handle 50,000 users at once.

Now, that might not seem like a lot of people, but Bond says it’s a vast improvement.

According to Bond, "There is still some other issues it’s my understanding that they’re working through, like how the information once you sign up online is communicated to the insurance company and how long it takes to do the billing process."

Bond says the next order of business for the white house technology team should be making the site faster.

"In an ideal world, everything would have worked on day one. In a practical world, I don’t think that many things of this size and complexity work perfectly on day one. So, I’m glad they’ve been aggressively addressing it and there’s going to be some work to do," says Bond.

There’s no word on when the next round of changes will be made to the website.

You have until December 23rd to apply for benefits if you want to be covered by January 1st.