The New York Times:
The website, HealthCare.gov, was supposed to be ready on Oct. 1, but an array of technical problems made it impossible for all but a trickle of customers to compare policies and enroll in a plan. For some weeks in October, the site was down 60 percent of the time. That dire situation at the front end of the process has been largely corrected through a frantic repair effort over the past five weeks, but it won’t be enough unless the final back-end stage of enrollment is fixed as well.
On Sunday, the administration issued a progress report asserting that the system was running smoothly for a vast majority of users, that the site was now working more than 90 percent of the time, and that consumers were getting much better feedback from the site than before. Thanks to software and hardware improvements, the average page is loading in less than a second compared with an average of 8 seconds in late October, and the number of frustrating error messages that block people from using the site has fallen below 1 percent.
Dana Milbank at The Washington Post:
Press secretary Jay Carney announced that the site had weathered 375,000 visitors in the first 12 hours of Monday. He called it “significantly improved” and said it was functioning “effectively for the vast majority of users.” Carney spoke of a “vast improvement” and said the White House had reached its goal that “the vast majority of users are able to access the site and have it function effectively.” [...] Conveniently, figures leaked Monday indicated that 100,000 people signed up for insurance on HealthCare.gov in November, quadruple October’s dismal result. Democratic lawmakers came out of hiding and spoke of the improvements with a spirit that had eluded them in the weeks since the Web site crashed on launch.
But the real gauge of HealthCare.gov’s improvement was Republicans’ response — or lack thereof. When the House returned from Thanksgiving recess on Monday afternoon, the GOP speakers on the floor essentially ignored the Web site, instead returning to their earlier denunciations of Obamacare overall and President Obama in general.
More on this and other stories below the fold.
Greg Sargent adds his take:
[T]he big picture is that far more people who need health insurance — whether they were bumped from plans or whether they were previously uninsured — will now be mostly able to go online, do some shopping, and buy health insurance. Before, they couldn’t.
This isn’t as good a story as the website’s implosion was, and if the site continues to function as expected, it will mostly stop getting media coverage. The press will move on to the next Obamacare disaster story, should it materialize: The “keep your doctor” saga, coming soon via Republican press release directly to reporters’ inboxes.
But the current fix has mostly tamped down concerns among Democratic lawmakers, and barring some truly catastrophic change, they just aren’t going to abandon the law in any meaningful sense. Meanwhile, demand looks likely to continue, even as insurance companies redouble their efforts to entice people on to the exchanges, which means enrollment will continue piling up, too.
Alicia Caldwell at The Denver Post takes a look at attempts by employers to control their employee's coverage:
[I]magine, despite the coverage guarantees of Obamacare, the religious beliefs of those running your company dictated the care you get. Imagine that a diaphragm is a birth-control option but an IUD is not.
This would be religious freedom at work. That is, your employer's freedom.
In an effort to avoid the requirements of Obamacare, a handful of for-profit businesses are claiming their religious rights would be violated by having to offer certain birth-control methods via their health plans. [...] This is a radical interpretation that could undermine not only the Affordable Care Act, but also the rights of actual people who count on employee-based insurance for health care.
Switching topics,
Jonathan Capehart looks at the state of the GOP:
A tweet from the party’s official Twitter account on Sunday would not have celebrated Rosa Parks on the anniversary of her historic bus-boycott arrest by lauding “her role in ending racism.” Sure, the tweet was later corrected. But, come on, people. The lowest level black person at the RNC could have told them that the tweet as flat-out wrong and offensive. Not that anyone would have listened, assuming there are any low-level black people there.
That RNC tweet was so egregious that when I asked Steele about it via e-mail yesterday, all he could muster was a pitying response. “What can one say about such a gross misunderstanding of the African American experience in America.”
Finally, on the topic of rape in the military,
Senators Claire McCaskill and Kelly Ayotte call for action:
This year's defense bill will be a watershed moment for curbing sexual assaults in America's military.
What will change look like? Stripping commanders of their ability to overturn convictions, assigning victims independent lawyers, mandating dishonorable discharge for those convicted, criminalizing retaliation against victims, and requiring the civilian head of each service to review decisions to not prosecute. These historic proposals are already included in the defense bill. But we're going further.
We introduced an amendment along with Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., to eliminate using a soldier's service record as a defense and to allow victims' input in whether their case goes to military or civilian court. We're also working on reforming pretrial processes to better protect victims.