WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 (UPI) -- Former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., said Sunday that though improvements may have been made to HealthCare.gov, the insurance industry is reporting problems.
Federal health officials announced Sunday they met their self-imposed deadline to install hardware upgrades and software fixes to improve the Affordable Care Act enrollment website.
Under the improvements, the average system response time is less than 1 second and the error rate is "consistently well below 1 percent," The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced Sunday in a report. The online system is stable 90 percent of the time and up to 50,000 shoppers are able to use the site simultaneously for up to 800,000 visits per day.
In an appearance on CNN's "State of the Union," Santorum said that while there may be improvements with what consumers see when they visit the website, for insurance agents, it's different story.
"I talked to ... some people in the insurance industry this morning, and they told me that most of the front end may be looking good," he said. "People may be able to get on and get responses, but the information coming out the back end to the insurance companies is still garbage. It's undecipherable. And it's requiring them to, on a case-by-case basis, actually have someone go -- because there's misinformation, there's triplicates, there's husbands labeled as wives. There's all sorts of problems with the data coming into the insurance companies. So you think you may have signed up, but you may not, because the insurance company may not have the data available to actually put you in the system."
"This really feeds into the president's competence," Santorum added. "That's really the question that the people have, 'is the president competent to do his job?' And Obamacare is certainly front and center."
