Maggie Fox: “Two months after its disastrous launch, HealthCare.gov is much better, working more than 90 percent of the time and up to the promised capacity of 50,000 users at any given time, government officials said Sunday. But it’s not at 100 percent yet, with the final steps of enrollment still glitchy. While the site looks better to consumers, the final steps of signing up with an insurer and making sure a policy is paid for are still a work in progress, officials said. ‘The bottom line: HealthCare.gov on December 1 is night and day from where it was on Oct 1,’ Jeff Zients, the new White House economic adviser who’s heading the site repair effort, told reporters on a conference call.”
Politico: “The Obama administration said Sunday that it achieved its goal of making HealthCare.gov work for the ‘vast majority’ of users after the disastrous start of enrollment in the president’s signature health law.”
USA Today: "The White House announced Sunday it has met its goal to make its troubled Healthcare.gov website operate smoothly for most users, fueling hope among Democrats that attention can now turn to successes of the underlying health care law."
Washington Post: "After a series of technical fixes and capacity upgrades, many of which were made over the past week, HealthCare.gov is now working more than 90 percent of the time — a big improvement over October, when the site was operating only about 43 percent of the time and frequently crashed, said Jeffrey Zients, the administration official overseeing the improvements."
New York Times: "Weeks of frantic technical work appear to have made the government’s health care website easier for consumers to use. But that does not mean everyone who signs up for insurance can enroll in a health plan. The problem is that so-called back end systems, which are supposed to deliver consumer information to insurers, still have not been fixed. And with coverage for many people scheduled to begin in just 30 days, insurers are worried the repairs may not be completed in time."
Wall Street Journal: "Insurers and some states are continuing to look for ways to bypass the balky technology underpinning the health-care law despite the Obama administration's claim Sunday that it had made "dramatic progress" in fixing the federal insurance website. Federal officials said they had largely succeeded in repairing parts of the site that had most snarled users in the two months since its troubled launch, but acknowledged they only had begun to make headway on the biggest underlying problems: the system's ability to verify users' identities and accurately transmit enrollment data to insurers."
Roll Call: “Sometimes to save the patient, you have to chop off a limb. The Obama administration is doing just that with the underperfoming HealthCare.gov website, announcing Wednesday that it will give up on opening the exchange for small businesses for another year and will rely on direct enrollment through insurance companies and brokers instead.”
The Hill: "Former administration officials and Democratic operatives say President Obama is ill-served by his current White House staff and must reboot his second term team following the disastrous ObamaCare rollout. First-term insiders argue the White House’s weakness was defined by a lack of preparedness, messaging blunders and failure to keep the president informed."
The Boston Globe: “Vice President Joe Biden, keeping up a tradition spanning nearly four decades, is back on the shores of Nantucket for Thanksgiving.”
“As U.S. Vice President Joe Biden arrives in Asia on Monday for a visit to Japan, China and South Korea, the relationship between America’s two biggest allies in Northeast Asia isn’t merely bad, it’s toxic,” AP writes. “This matters to Washington because it’s poisoning efforts to forge a unified front as China challenges U.S. military pre-eminence in the region. China recently alarmed its neighbors and Washington by announcing a new maritime air defense zone in the East China Sea partly to assert its claims over disputed islands controlled by Japan.”
Biden will visit the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea Satuready.