11th-hour health-insurance seekers clog gov't website

WASHINGTON - In a flood of last-minute sign-ups, hundreds of thousands of Americans rushed to apply for health insurance yesterday, but deadline day for President Obama's overhaul brought long, frustrating waits and a new spate of website ills.

"This is like trying to find a parking spot at Walmart on Dec. 23," said Jason Stevenson, working with a Utah nonprofit group helping people enroll.

At times, more than 125,000 people were simultaneously using HealthCare.gov, straining it beyond its capacity. For long stretches yesterday, applicants were shuttled to a virtual waiting room where they could leave an email address and be contacted later.

Officials said the site had not crashed, but was experiencing very heavy volume. The website, which was receiving 1.5 million visitors a day last week, had recorded about 1.6 million through 2 p.m.

Supporters of the health-care law fanned out across the country in a final dash to sign up uninsured Americans. People not signed up for health insurance by the deadline, either through their jobs or on their own, were subject to being fined by the IRS, and that threat was helping drive the final dash.

The administration announced last week that people still in line by midnight would get extra time to enroll.

The website stumbled early in the day - it was out of service for nearly four hours as technicians patched a software bug. Another hiccup in the early afternoon temporarily kept new applicants from signing up, and then things slowed further. Overwhelmed by computer problems when launched last fall, the system has been working much better in recent months, but independent testers say it still runs slowly.

Erik Furness, 47, of Philadelphia, was just in time. The barber created an account and expected to wrap up the process in the coming days, he said.

"Oh man, I'm very optimistic about it," Furness said. "It's a big, heavy load off my shoulders. . . . I haven't had any health care, and in my profession, if I get sick, I can't make a living."

Furness was one of more than 90 people who came into St. Elizabeth's Community and Wellness Center, on 23rd Street near Berks in North Philadelphia, yesterday as part of an outreach event by Project HOME and the Pennsylvania Health Access Network.

The White House and other supporters of the law were hoping for an enrollment surge that would push sign-ups in the new health-insurance markets to about 6.5 million people. That's halfway between a revised goal of 6 million and the original target of 7 million. The first goal was scaled back after the federal website's disastrous launch last fall, which kept it offline during most of October.

The insurance markets - or exchanges - offer subsidized private health insurance to people who don't have access to coverage through their jobs. The federal government is taking the lead in 36 states, while 14 other states plus Washington, D.C., are running their own enrollment websites.

The administration hasn't said how many of the 6 million people nationally who had signed up before the weekend ultimately closed the deal by paying their first month's premiums. Also unknown is how many were previously uninsured - the real test of Obama's health-care overhaul. In addition, the law expands coverage for low-income people through Medicaid, but only about half the states have agreed to implement that option.