All of the Healthcare.gov consumers who couldn't enroll due to faulty 834 forms have been contacted, according to the Centers for medicare and Medicaid Services.
It's another example of how the Obama administration is trying to dig out of the hole of the botched website rollout with just a week to go until enrollment for Jan. 1 ends. Those without insurance can still sign up by March 31 to avert the tax penalty this year.
CMS spokeswoman Julie Bataille told reporters in a daily telephone briefing that the approximately 15,000 users who experienced the 834 error were directly contacted by the federal marketplace and are now taking the next steps to complete enrollment. In addition to those 15,000 applicants, Bataille said the agency has reached out to "hundreds of thousands of consumers" who got stuck in different phases of the application in October and November and never finished their application.
Bataille also said the website is now stable and saw almost 500,000 visits over the weekend. CMS is continuing to make improvements to the website and enhanced the window shopping feature to display the lowest-priced plans available to an individual, the administration says.
The government now says the error rate is down to 0.5 percent on the web site.