Healthcare website won't be perfect on Dec. 1, administration says

Obama administration officials said Monday that some visitors to HealthCare.gov will experience outages, slow response times or try-again-later messages in December. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) delivered the message in the latest attempt to downplay expectations for Nov. 30, the administration's self-imposed deadline for fixing ObamaCare's federal enrollment site. CMS spokeswoman Julie Bataille said errors that persist past this weekend would be "intermittent" and, in line with a promise made by the White House, would not affect the vast majority of the site's users. But Bataille acknowledged that some would still experience "periods of suboptimal performance" by the system due to either heavy traffic or technical issues that are still being addressed.