healthcare
Healthcare.gov’s lackluster launch on Oct. 1 resulted in weeks of software and hardware updates to the website. The Obama administration had promised to have the site working for the “majority” of users by Nov. 30. Reuters

Roughly 100,000 people signed up for heath care through the federal digital marketplace HealthCare.gov in November, four times the numbers for October’s disastrous rollout.

An inside source with the Affordable Care Act website confirmed the numbers to Bloomberg, stating that approximately 100,000 people “successfully selected” a health care plan through HealthCare.gov in November. The number is up from some 26,000 that signed up through the federal marketplace in October. While the numbers are increasing, they are still fall far below the Obama administration’s initial hopes of 800,000 registered users in the first two months.

Despite numerous technical errors plaguing the site for its first two months, HealthCare.gov is finally running smoothly and is reportedly capable of handling about 50,000 users at any given time. Previously, the site could only support about 1,000 users at once, leading to a host of error messages and widespread user frustrations. The Obama administration plans to continue updating and refining the federal marketplace over the next few months.

Health and Human Services spokeswoman Joanne Peters refused to confirm specific numbers to Politico, but noted that an increasing amount of people are signing up through the federal marketplace. She says that official numbers will likely be announced in the coming weeks.

“We’re in the process of scrubbing final data and expect to report November numbers in mid-December, but we expect that enrollment will increase with the technical improvements we’ve made, enrollment taking place across our customer service channels and the surge in enrollment that many states who are running their own marketplaces have reported,” Peters told Politico. “At the same time, it’s important to remember we are just two months into a six-month open enrollment period that we expect will ramp up over time as we’ve seen in other implementation efforts, such as Massachusetts and Medicare Part D.”