The Healthcare.gov website is displayed on a laptop computer arranged for a photograph in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Thursday, Oct. 24, 2013
Perceptions of the new health care reform law’s implementation are slowly improving, according to a new poll, but two-thirds of Americans still say the Obama administration’s rollout isn’t going well.
The Associated Press poll out Monday found that 66 percent of adults say the Obamacare rollout is going poorly, but that’s down from 76 percent last month. Still, 71 percent of people whose households tried to buy insurance plans on the law’s new health insurance exchange marketplaces encountered problems. The federal government’s exchange website, Healthcare.gov, suffered severe problems after going live in October. The White House says those issues have now been mostly resolved.
The AP poll provided some limited evidence to back that claim up: The share who said they successfully bought a new insurance plan on the exchanges grew to 40 percent, up from 24 percent in December.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius said last week that three million Americans had signed up for private insurance coverage through state or federal exchanges, with 800,000 doing so in January. That’s still far below the administration’s goal of signing up seven million people by the end of March. A Gallup poll last week found that the percentage of uninsured adults fell to 16.1 percent this month, its lowest level since the end of 2012.
The AP poll of 1,060 adults, conducted from Jan. 17 to 21, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.