Obama Was Warned, Take It Offline and Other HealthCare.gov News

Follow key reporting on the Obama administration’s signature policy initiative.

The rocky rollout of HealthCare.gov, the website for people to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, has garnered a lot of attention from the media as well as technology analysts. Here's our daily roundup of some of the key reports you may have missed:

  • Warning: So maybe President Obama was warned HealthCare.gov was likely to fail after all, The Washington Post reports. But that was back in 2010. By then, it was already clear the people running the show weren’t technologists.

  • Sebelius on Enrollment: After reports last week that only six people were able to register for insurance plans through HealthCare.gov in the site’s first 24 hours, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said she didn’t know where those numbers came from. "I don't pay a lot of attention to these early reports, because the system was flawed," she said, adding that the flaws were partly because of demand.

  • A Survey on Enrollment: A poll published Monday said about  20 percent of visitors to the site have already enrolled in health care plans. If accurate, that’s certainly a higher figure than previously reported enrollments from the site’s first few days.

  • Other Enrollment Options: If enrolling through HealthCare.gov is impossible, there’s always the phone and paper routes, but apparently they haven’t been glitch free, either, according to The Hill and CBS.

  • Just take HealthCare.gov offline until it’s fixed, one lawmaker says. "They need to take the site down, stabilize it -- meaning they can't continue to add code every week -- and then they need to stress test the system," Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., said on CBS' Face the Nation.