WASHINGTON — The last official day of ObamaCare enrollment this year was much like the first day: full of glitches.
The health plan’s Web site crashed twice Monday as a stampede of last-minute applicants rushed to beat the midnight deadline for the first open enrollment period.
The site went down for about four hours in the early morning while the administration’s geek squad patched a software bug. It was fixed at around 9 a.m.
But by lunchtime, another snag blocked new applicants from signing up for an hour or two.
The technical difficulties and delays were frustrating for applicants.
“They should have fixed it before they tried to get 7 million people to sign up,” fumed Sabrina Jones, 54, who spent about two hours waiting for help to sign up at Anne Arundel Community College in Maryland.
Jones said she was going in person “because you can’t get on online and I’ve been trying for two months … can’t get through online, can’t get through on the phone.”
She said she sent a nasty e-mail about her experience to the White House.
For the administration, the problems were a grim reminder of the botched launch of the dysfunctional HealthCare.gov Web site Oct. 1 — missteps that began the rapid erosion of public support for President Obama’s health-care law.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said the Web site snafus were just the tip of the ObamaCare iceberg. “As I’ve said many times, the problem was never just about the Web site — it’s the whole law,” he said.
The success of ObamaCare depends on enough young and healthy Americans signing up and paying into the system to help cover the cost of new benefits.
The site had about 1.5 million visitors a day last week, but got inundated with 1.2 million visitors by noon Monday — likely pushing the final enrollment tally close to the administration’s goal of 7 million.
The White House reported 6 million sign-ups as of last week.
Republicans were skeptical of the official figures, noting that they don’t indicate how many Americans actually paid for insurance plans.
The administration’s numbers also do not reveal how many young people enrolled or how many were among the approximately 5 million who lost old plans because of ObamaCare.