The Obama Administration Plans A 'Tech Surge' To Fix The Obamacare Website

Heavy traffic volumes and, as the Obama administration eventually admitted, system errors overwhelmed the site, which is where consumers in 36 states are supposed to buy the regulated, subsidized health plans made available under the Affordable Care Act.

Now, the administration says it plans to deploy a programming A-Team to address the issue.

That's according to a blog item posted Sunday on the Department of Health and Human Services' website, under the heading "Tech Surge."

Here's the important part:

"Our team is bringing in some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government to scrub in with the team and help improve HealthCare.gov.

"We're also putting in place tools and processes to aggressively monitor and identify parts of HealthCare.gov where individuals are encountering errors or having difficulty using the site, so we can prioritize and fix them.

"We are also defining new test processes to prevent new issues from cropping up as we improve the overall service and deploying fixes to the site during off-peak hours on a regular basis.

A White House official tells Business Insider that President Obama will speak Monday morning about the situation and how it's being resolved. The official said in an email:

The President will directly address the technical problems with HealthCare.gov - troubles that he and his team find unacceptable - and discuss the actions he has pushed for to make it easier for consumers to comparison shop and enroll for insurance while work continues around the clock to improve the website.

A consulting firm cited by The Hill estimated just 36,000 people out of 9.5 million unique visitors had successfully enrolled five days after the site's debut on Oct. 1.

By Oct. 13, traffic to the site had plummeted 88%.