U.S. government scrambles to provide access to Obamacare sites

The U.S. government on Wednesday scrambled to add computer capacity to handle an unexpectedly large number of Americans logging onto new online insurance marketplaces created under Present Barack Obama's healthcare reform law.

Technical glitches and heavy traffic slowed Tuesday's launch of the marketplaces, particularly for the federal Healthcare.gov website serving 36 states.

Administration officials said they expected bumps and glitches as the national program to provide benefits to millions of uninsured Americans rolls out under the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare.

Healthcare.gov website advised users on Wednesday to wait for pages to load, rather than revisit the website, as they added servers and streamlined the system to improve the performance.

Delays and other problems also continued to plague marketplaces run by states such as Maryland, whose website cautioned visitors that some steps could take up to two minutes to complete but left users stranded after more than an hour.

Healthcare.gov alone had about 4.7 million unique visits in its first 24 hours, while a federal Obamacare call center received more than 190,000 visits, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Similar volumes were expected for Wednesday.

To share your experience with the online exchanges, see: here

Officials and organizers were elated by the large numbers as a sign of the demand for the new insurance plans, which will be open for enrollment through March 31. But they predicted actual enrollment would pick up slowly and probably peak in early 2014.

"Across the board, the interest is really overwhelming," said Anne Filipic, president of Enroll America, a private nonprofit group aligned with the White House.

"The fact people are visiting a website or calling a hotline to get information, that's the first step in a process to compare your options, talk to friends and neighbors and determine what makes the most sense," Filipic said.

Republican opponents of the law have warned for months of a "train wreck" when the new exchanges opened, given the potential for technical problems and even security breaches. They seized on news of the glitches this week as proof the law should be delayed, a demand that helped precipitate a partial shutdown of the federal government.

ENROLLMENT PUSH

An administration official said actual enrollment numbers will be released regularly but not beginning until mid-November.

The White House has also been working to make more Americans aware of the law via the Twitter hashtag #GetCovered.

A major element of the campaign has been a tie-up with celebrities. Singer Lady Gaga used the #GetCovered hashtag on Wednesday afternoon to promote the healthcare reform to more than 40 million followers, starting a cascade of thousands of retweets.