Health website transactions fail 10 percent of time: U.S. official

As millions of people shop online for new insurance plans under President Barack Obama's healthcare reform law, about 10 percent of applications to the main website are not being accurately transmitted, a government spokeswoman said on Friday. Last week, the White House wrapped up a five-week emergency effort to fix the most obvious of the website's technical problems and between midnight on Sunday and noon on Friday, government health officials said 3.7 million people visited. HealthCare.gov relays information about new customers in so-called "834" transaction forms to the private insurance companies that provide the health plans. "We believe nine of 10 transactions are being successfully transmitted," the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, spokeswoman Julie Bataille said at a news briefing.