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Obamacare Website Woes

SCRANTON — In Washington, lawmakers are sounding off about problems with the website, healthcare.gov, and in Scranton there are frustrations too. Suzanne ...

SCRANTON -- In Washington, lawmakers are sounding off about problems with the website, healthcare.gov, and in Scranton there are frustrations too.

Suzanne Slussar is a certified application counselor at Scranton Primary Heatlh Care Center.

She helps folks with the complicated process of signing up for and enrolling in a healthcare plan on what is called 'The Marketplace'.

Even she could not sign in on the government website until recently.

"We're all aware that there are issues with the website, so what we do then is I explain how the marketplace works and then there's a help line to call and I call the help line and they are also able to assist with enrollment," said Slussar.

In fact, Slussar said she has seen about 50 folks since enrollment started and the website was launched on October 1, and she has helped someone through the entire process for the first time on Thursday.

"A gentleman came in today, and I had success today, which was the first success story. With other consumers coming in, I was able to get as far as creating an account and then when it came to logging in, the web page would not come up," she said.

Scranton Primary Health Care Center serves about 9,000 patients, about 2,000 of those are uninsured or under insured and need to enroll for affordable healthcare, but the problems with the website have made that a challenge.

"It's a huge system I think that glitches were expected. I just didn't think the glitches would last this long. I thought they would be down a day or so when we first found out we couldn't go on, but they will get better," said Mary Lou Czyzyk, executive director of the Scranton Primary Health Care Center.

Slussar said people have until December 15 to enter into the system for Obamacare.

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