HealthCare.gov Update

Healthcare.gov

Obama to focus on positives of health care law

WASHINGTON — A day after his administration said healthcare.gov handled hundreds of thousands of visitors, President Barack Obama today will highlight people who have been helped by his health care reform law.

They’ll join the president at White House event. He’s also expected to charge that Republicans want to strip away benefits without offering an alternative.

FORT LAUDERDALE — Consumers are reporting a mix of successes and failures as they try logging onto the updated healthcare.gov site.

Brokers and online assisters in Utah say three of every four people who want to sign up for coverage on the federal government’s online exchange are succeeding within an hour of logging in. Navigators in Wisconsin, Illinois, Alabama and North Dakota reported vast improvement, while staffers in South Florida and Iowa were stymied by glitches on the federal website, which is serving 36 states.

About 750,000 had visited the site by Monday night — about double the traffic for a typical Monday. By 10 a.m., with about 30,000 visitors and growing error messages and response times, federal health officials deployed a new queue system.