By Sandhya Somashekhar
Sandhya Somashekhar
National correspondent

Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) sought to coax a little good news out of U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park, who laid out some improvements that have been completed on the health-care law Web site.

-    Response times have improved, and pages are loading quicker, he said. Two weeks ago, it was taking an average of 8 seconds to load a page. Now it’s under a second.
-    The account creation piece of the Web site, which was the part that failed most spectacularly on Oct. 1, is now working properly. The system is now capable of processing about 17,000 accounts an hour, a rate that will improve going forward.
-    CMS has begun reaching out to people who were thwarted during the account-creation process to encourage them to come back and enroll in coverage.
-    The data hub, which is the vast network connecting federal, state and insurer databases, has been working well since Day 1 and “continues to hum along nicely,” Park said.

Later in the House Oversight Committee hearing on Obamacare on Wednesday, Park acknowledged that there are still problems “downstream” from the account-creation piece.

One of the most serious issues has been the error-riddled reports being sent to insurers about who has enrolled in health coverage. Insurers have said that problem has improved only slightly, but that the trickle of enrollments they are getting is so thin that it has not been that difficult to root out the mistakes.