hardware and the tech folks coming in, we feel that while it s been a bumpy three weeks, we ve got the resources on the ground now to make sure that as the president said today, anybody who wants to go to healthcare.gov can go through beginning to end and have a good consumer experience. that s what we re building to. december 15th is the date you need to be signed up, if you want to have insurance starting on january 1st. march is the date you need to have been signed up, gotten insurance, if you don t want to pay the penalty. can you promise that the website will be fully functioning by either of those dates, december 15th or the march 2014 date? so jake, besides the improvements in the website that are going to continue throughout october into november, an important thing also to remember is that there are multiple pathways for folks that didn t exist before. the president mentioned one today in terms of the 1-800-318-2596 number.
unique visitors and the good news is, 500,000 applications and enrollments throughout the country and in the federal marketplaces. but david, you re not still saying that it s just a volume question, right? i mean, there are lots of individuals saying there are serious software issues, that the beta testing didn t happen, that there wasn t enough time to practice before the website was actually launched. you re not actually still saying this is just a question of volume? so jake, what i said was the initial problem the initial problem. okay. was driven by volume. what are we facing now? what we re doing here s what we know. folks are going through and applying. not enough folks are going through and applying. too many people are being held up. we ve got a tech surge throughout the process right now to determine where there are bugs, where there are glitches, to identify them, to isolate them and to fix them, so between