Federal health officials went ahead with the Oct. 1 launch of Obamacare’s online health insurance marketplace despite a failed test days before, the Washington Post reported Monday.
Government officials and contractors ran a test to see whether the web portal could handle traffic from tens of thousands of users simultaneously, and the site crashed after a simulation in which only a few hundred tried to log on at the same time, according to the Post.
Sources close to the project told the Post that key testing of the website didn’t take place until the week before the official launch. As late as Sept. 26, the sources said, no test had been carried out to determine whether a user could complete the enrollment process from beginning to end.
President Barack Obama acknowledged Monday that the health care law’s web site did not launch smoothly, assuring that although “nobody is more frustrated” than he is by its rollout, the law is “not just a website.”
