Oh, good: Healthcare.gov goes down on deadline day

Of course, it’s not really “deadline day,” so to speak; the enrollment period’s March 31st end date is more like a guideline than an actual rule, since one need only check-mark a box declaring that a previous attempt to get insurance through the website went unfinished for whatever reason. But, this is the day when all of the Obama administration’s furious marketing efforts and the ‘official’ deadline meet — so it’s a good thing the federal exchange website was down as of early this morning.

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Hours before the deadline for enrolling, the online page for enrolling in Obamacare went down Monday. …

“HealthCare.gov marketplace application and enrollment system is currently unavailable. The tech team is working now to bring the system online as soon as possible,” the Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement Monday morning.

The online application has been unavailable since 3:20 a.m.

I sort of thought we were past all this, but evidently not — and no, it isn’t because of some kind of 4 AM surge in enrollment attempts.

HHS spokeswoman to Joanne Peters said it was not a volume issue, and officials expect the site will be fixed later in the morning.

Oof. Healthcare.gov goes down regularly during off-peak nighttime hours for maintenance, but this morning’s extended technical blip was apparently the result of “software bug.” Winning.

Anyhow, the time is nigh to start evaluating how well the enrollment period really went, both for the law’s overall sustainability and for the insurers who’ll need to start evaluating how expensive their new government-mandated risk pools are going to be and how much to charge for premiums in the coming years; the White House will almost certainly be happily touting the six million figure they announced last week, but the really important information should start coming out soon: How many people made the jump from shopping for a plan to actually purchasing one? Of those people, how many are from the crucial “young invincible” demographic? How many are sicker with more healthcare needs than the general population? How many were previously uninsured?

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