WASHINGTON — It’s a fix . . . of sorts.
The Obama administration declared victory Sunday in meeting the deadline to fix the glitches and bugs that crippled the ObamaCare Web site since its disastrous Oct. 1 launch.
“The bottom line: HealthCare.gov on Dec. 1 is night and day from where it was on Oct. 1,” boasted management guru Jeff Zients, whom President Obama tapped in mid-October to oversee the emergency repairs.
But the Web site is far from perfect. A test run by The Post hit a snag downloading the critical identity-verification page.
An attempt by a CNN reporter to log on to the site encountered the familiar error message: “Sorry, there is a problem with our system.”
In a conference call with reporters, Zients said more than 400 bugs were “knocked off the punch list.”
“We’ve widened the system’s on-ramp. It now has four lanes instead of one or two,” he said. “We have a much more stable system that is reliably open.”
The improvements cited included:
* HealthCare.gov can now handle 50,000 users at the same time.
* At least 800,000 people a day can complete the application process online.
* The system runs faster, with response time down from eight seconds to less than one second.
*The site fully operates 95 percent of the time, leaving a 1-in-20 chance of hitting a roadblock.
*It crashes less than once for every 100 mouse clicks.
The administration’s figures cannot be independently verified.
Officials said ongoing repairs will focus on the “back end” of the system, where consumers’ personal information and payments are sent to insurance companies.
“The information coming out the back end to the insurance companies is still garbage. It’s undecipherable,” former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “So you think you may have signed up, but you may not, because the insurance company may not have the data available to actually put you in the system,” he said.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) said he’s more concerned that “the security of this site . . . does not meet even the minimal standards of the private sector.
“I don’t care if you’re for it or against it, Republican or Democrat, we should not tolerate the sheer level of incompetence securing this site,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said the political damage to Obama was already done.
“You never get a second chance to make a first impression. The first impression here was terrible. This thing is going to be an unmitigated political disaster for the president,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”
On the same show, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) rallied for the repairs, saying, “It’s going to get better. It’s already better today.”
Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) credited the administration with meeting its own deadline.
“The administration has hit the big benchmarks they set out,” he said on the NBC show.
Obama set Nov. 30 as the deadline to fix the site for the “vast majority” of users.