Public Sentiment On HealthCare.gov Takes A Nosedive

The public’s impression of HealthCare.gov, the Obama administration’s online health insurance marketplace, remains deeply negative two weeks after its troubled launch, according to an analysis of Twitter sentiment.

That's a reversal from what was happening in the weeks leading up to the Oct. 1 launch of the online insurance exchange, when more tweeters expressed positive opinions about HealthCare.gov than negative opinions, according to an analysis by Topsy, an analytics firm that mines Twitter to gauge public sentiment.

The marketplace’s sentiment score shot up a few days before the public launch, spurred mainly by tweets from news organizations urging people to check the site out, according to Topsy’s analysis. That sentiment score dropped precipitously once the online marketplace was online and has remained low ever since. (See the graph below).