Healthcare market opens with few hitches The Obama administration's healthcare marketplace opened without a major hitch at the weekend, avoiding the website crashes and logjams that delivered a serious setback to the president's signature reforms last year. Thousands of Americans began signing up for health insurance on HealthCare.gov as its second annual enrolment period opened on Saturday, with reports of login problems and helpline backlogs but no serious technical failures. The fact that the federal website seems to have passed a crucial test will prompt relief at the White House, but it does not defuse two graver threats to Mr Obama's landmark healthcare reforms. They come from the Supreme Court and a Republican-controlled Congress. The US Supreme Court this month agreed to hear a potentially destructive legal challenge to government subsidies - which take the form of tax credits - that are vital to enabling millions of people to afford private insurance from the marketplace. At the same time Republicans, emboldened by a resounding victory in congressional elections, are gearing up to use their control of both chambers of Congress to try to repeal parts of the healthcare law, the Affordable Care Act. As a result the Obama administration is being dragged back into old fights over the law, drowning out its message about the benefits of requiring all Americans to hold insurance and making it affordable. The administration has forecast that up to 9.9m people will enrol in so-called Obamacare health plans for 2015, although that is 3m fewer than congressional budget analysts had predicted previously. The White House hired Accenture to overhaul the online marketplace at a cost of $175m after it jettisoned CGI, a Canadian tech company that bore some of the blame for last year's high-profile glitches. On Saturday, Sylvia Mathews Burwell, who oversees the system as secretary of health and human services, said 23,000 people had completed online applications in the first eight hours after HealthCare.gov opened. During the first day of enrolment last year only six people managed to complete the process as the website buckled under the strain of users. It remained a technical disaster for several weeks afterwards. Many of those signing up for health insurance received the government subsidies that are being challenged in the Supreme Court case. A court ruling in favour of the plaintiffs could take subsidies away from more than 4m Americans, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, a think-tank. At issue is whether the law allows the federal government to give subsidies to people in 34 states that have opted out of establishing their own exchanges, leaving citizens to instead buy on the federal marketplace. Timothy Jost, an advocate of healthcare reform at Washington and Lee University, said blocking the subsidies would destabilise the finances of some local insurance markets, because many healthy people would stop buying coverage, but sick - and thus more expensive - customers would keep theirs. "The consequence would be that individual markets in many states could collapse or be severely threatened," he said. I think our guys would shed nary a tear if all that work went to naught and it was gone Neil Trautwein, healthcare specialist at the National Retail Federation To make matters worse for the White House, Republicans have seized on a video that surfaced last week showing an architect of the policy saying it passed because of a lack of transparency over its funding and the "stupidity of the American voter." That has given fresh momentum to a Republican campaign to pick apart the healthcare law, using their newly won control of the Senate and their tightened grip on the House of Representatives. Republican leaders say they still want to repeal the entire Affordable Care Act and many big companies would be relieved to see it go, even though they have spent many dollars and hours preparing to comply with key parts of it by January 1, 2015. "I think our guys would shed nary a tear if all that work went to naught and it was gone," said Neil Trautwein, a healthcare specialist at the National Retail Federation, a trade group with many members that sponsor employee coverage. A full repeal, however, is improbable. Republicans have a better chance of passing bills to undo the law's least popular provisions and then sending them to Mr Obama - who would have to decide whether to veto them or not. Their chief targets are the twin "mandates" that require companies to give full-time employees health insurance and require all Americans to have health coverage of one form or another. But Republicans still need a few Democratic votes to pass bills in the Senate and they will struggle to recruit allies from across the political aisle to roll back central parts of the law. Republicans will have a better chance of narrowing the definition of a full-time worker so it includes fewer employees, a change that retailers, restaurants and other employers of low-wage workers are desperate to see. The best prospect for bipartisan action is on repealing a tax on medical devices such as pacemakers, which is embedded in the law. It is projected to raise $29bn in revenue over 10 years to fund the expansion of health coverage, but critics say it is hobbling an industry that is meant to help the sick in other ways. Repealing it, however, would create a funding hole that would need to be filled.