WASHINGTON – After an extended maintenance period from 9 p.m. Friday to 8 a.m. Saturday EST, the Obama administration has said it expects its error-prone registration website for health coverage to be working as intended. The administration imposed a deadline to have HealthCare.gov running without major issues on the last day of November, though some errors are still expected to happen after the maintenance.

After a poor October 1 launch that could not handle the large amount of traffic that the site immediately generated - many visitors were pushed into a queue that advised them to return at a certain time - the website "will not work perfectly (on December 1), but it will operate much better than it did in October," said Julie Bataille, communications director at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, during a recent phone briefing with the press.

Once maintenance is performed, administration officials expect the site to handle 50,000 visitors at once. The last day to sign up for health coverage that starts at the beginning of 2014 will be December 23.

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