Fast Recovery for Health Care Website The Obama administration says it has made enormous improvements in its website for enrolling consumers in new health insurance plans. There are still major hurdles to surmount, but the strides made raise the prospects that the website will be able to help millions of Americans buy policies from private insurers on new insurance exchanges, either by Dec. 23, the deadline for policies that will take effect on Jan. 1, or by March 31, the deadline for taking out coverage without being fined. There will be federal subsidies to help those on modest incomes pay the premiums. The website, HealthCare.gov, was supposed to be ready on Oct. 1, but an array of technical problems made it impossible for all but a trickle of customers to compare policies and enroll in a plan. For some weeks in October, the site was down 60 percent of the time. That dire situation at the front end of the process has been largely corrected through a frantic repair effort over the past five weeks, but it won't be enough unless the final back-end stage of enrollment is fixed as well. On Sunday, the administration issued a progress report asserting that the system was running smoothly for a vast majority of users, that the site was now working more than 90 percent of the time, and that consumers were getting much better feedback from the site than before. Thanks to software and hardware improvements, the average page is loading in less than a second compared with an average of 8 seconds in late October, and the number of frustrating error messages that block people from using the site has fallen below 1 percent. The administration estimated that the site could support 50,000 users at the same time, that users spend an average of 20 to 30 minutes on it, and that the site can support 800,000 visits a day. We won't know how accurate those projections are until that many users try to use it. The website serves 36 states, but many other states have set up their own exchanges, several of which are working better than the federal exchanges. Some are in worse shape. The big challenge ahead is to upgrade the back-end systems that transmit information to insurance companies so that they can complete the enrollment process. Consumers have until Dec. 23 to sign up for policies effective on Jan. 1, leaving only three weeks to solve the back-end problem. In some cases, insurers have no record of some people who think they have enrolled or have received inaccurate or incomplete information for some enrollees. One big problem is that some insurers say they have not been told what subsidies a customer will get and what premium should be paid by the customer. If those problems can't be fixed quickly, the administration will need to find alternate ways for people to enroll and get subsidies without going through the website.