e.j., she said i want to a l appaologize that the web has no worked as well as it should. what are you expecting from these questions and what do you think she can do to help further the administration s cause? well, i think that what she needs to do is say here is why we think it s fixable by the end of november. i think the administration has set itself a very hard target in the public s mind here. they re saying just after thanksgiving, this is going to work for most people. now, they got a little wiggle room. what is the definition of most. but i think they re going to be judged by whether people can access this site and get insurance. and so i think she needs to take people through why they think these problems are not problems that are so fundamental this they have got to reconstruct the entire thing. i think she s going to be pressed hard on that, not only by republicans but by democrats who voted for this thing, because they don t want to be stuck out there next year in an
on health insurance. by creating competition where there wasn t competition before, insurers are now eager for new business and have created new health care plans with more choices. the premiums for coverage were lower than expected and millions of americans will also qualify for tax credits to make the coverage even more affordable. we know that consumers are eager to purchase this coverage, and to the millions of americans who have attempted to use healthcare.gov to shop and enroll in insurance care coverage, i want to apologize to you that the website has not worked as well as it should. we know how desperately you need affordable coverage. i want to assure you that healthcare.gov can and will be fixed and we are working around the clock to deliver the shopping experience that you deserve. we are seeing improvements each week and by the end of november the experience on the site will be smooth for the vast majority of users. over the past month, millions of visited healthcare.gov to
improvements and parts of the system are already working well. for example, the data hub, the routing tool that provides an efficient and secure way to verify information submitted by consumers is sending determinations to the marketplace in less than 1.2 seconds. social security has reported 4.2 million transactions with the hub and the irs has responded to more than 1.3 million requests. even with the success, we know there s still significant work to do and we ve called in a team of experts led by jeff zients to analyze the site, identify and prioritize fixes. we spent the last few weeks last week going over that. and while these problems will require a lot of hard work, the bottom line conclusion is this health care.gov site is fixable. to get the job done, we ve identified a clear path forward. a lot of fixes will be undertaken one by one. to ensure the work is done as quickly and efficiently as possible we ve enlisted qssi to
volume. and despite our best volume projections, we underestimated the volume, the interest in the site. you noted the volume isn t the same as the applicants and the enrollment. that you yourself visited the site. clearly you weren t shopping for it, others did as well. so to the chairman s point, the number of applicants, the number of enrollees still not known is pretty modest, wouldn t you agree? but i would tell you that the number of visitors to the site and the number of people interested in completing applications was larger than even our initial projections. we worked our projections off of the seven million number that chairman camp mentioned. we also worked it off our history with medicare part d. so we ve added capacity to the system and we ve improved system performance. that s the first thing. the second thing is that we have found some what i will call functional or glitches, as we call them, in the public term,
look at new health care coverage under the affordable care act. in that time, nearly 700,000 applications for coverage have been submitted across the nation. more than half of those are in the federal marketplace alone. this tremendous interest confirms that american people are looking for quality affordable health care coverage. we know that the consumer experience has been frustrating for many americans. some have had trouble creating accounts and logging into the site, while others have received confusing error messages or had to wait for slow response times. this initial experience has not lived up to our expectations or the expectations of the american people and it is not acceptable. we are committed to improving the performance and have already made progress. in the first few days when the site went live, few customers could create an account. now over 90% can. we ve updated the site several times, fixing bugs and improving the healthcare.gov experience and added more capacity i