[CNBC]
Hurry up and wait—for your Obamacare health insurance.
Two days after Tuesday’s launch of government-run health insurance marketplaces, technological problems continue to prevent many people from checking out prices and enrolling via the online sites.
The lags and service suspensions—which the marketplaces attribute primarily to high visitor volumes—drew harsh criticism from tech experts who said the system should have been better prepared.
But Obamacare advocates said they are heartened by the level of interest—including 7 million unique visitors to the federal portal, Healthcare.gov, since it opened—which are helping to dispel fears that not enough people will enroll in the insurance plans.
“Many people have waited years, or even decades, for this coverage, and they are not discouraged by Web slowdowns,” said a spokesman for the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “We have added more servers and engineers, improved systems configurations so it can handle more volume, to improve wait times.”