Medicare and Medicaid Services

Even now, just a day after the relaunch, it seems likely that the performance goals the administration was shooting for have not actually been hit: On a press call this afternoon, a spokesperson for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services backed away from the 50,000 simultaneous users figure that officials provided just yesterday.

If the administration does eventually meet its performance goals, however, it remains to be seen whether they will be enough. In the days following the launch of the exchanges, federal officials falsely claimed that the sole cause of the system’s dysfunction was too much traffic. But as we get closer to the deadline for signing up for coverage that begins next year, traffic loads could add to the system’s problems. The rebuilt system is supposed to be able to handle about 50,000 concurrent users, but when the site launched, there were as many as 250,000 people trying to log on all at once. If a flood of users does try to sign up in the next few weeks, that could be a problem.

So if demand for enrollment is high, the system is liable to crash again, resulting in more of the kind of frustrations we’ve already seen. On the other hand, if demand is low, then that suggests a different set of problems—minimal interest in the insurance being sold on the exchanges, and, as a result, smaller risk pools made up of sicker individuals who will be more expensive to insure. Either way, in other words, it won't really work.

*No, I don't literally mean "no one."