With about a week to go before the Dec. 23 deadline to apply for health coverage commencing Jan. 1, 2014, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on Saturday announced that the HealthCare.gov website had been fixed so that complete and correct information would henceforth be transmitted to affected insurance companies

HHS said that the error rate is now down to 0.38 percent from nearly 25 percent.Through yesterday, some 15,000 applications had been sent to insurers with insufficient or incorrect applicant information on the Form 834 used in the process.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) staff are now sorting through those 15,000 applications and contacting applicants to correct or complete the information on the Form 834.