Really Awkward Obamacare Moment (Again)

HealthCare.gov — you know, that place where you gotta sign up for health insurance by midnight Monday — went down for about six hours Monday. Which (awkward) is the day of the deadline for many people to sign up. But it wasn't all bad news for President Obama: The site's performance, or lack thereof, occurred in the middle of crazy-high last-minute demand.

Politico reports that the site sputtered between 3:20 a.m., but was back up by 9 a.m. Officials found a software bug overnight and decided to repair it, but the time it took to apply a last-minute fix stretched into primetime for the site on Monday. All things considered, this probably could've been worse.

A last-minute push by the administration to convince people to sign up, combined with the impending deadline, meant more than two million people logged onto the site over the weekend. That's just a fraction of the 8.7 million who visited in the past week. America: A nation of procrastinators, from sea to shining sea.

The buggy site cast a major pall over the rollout of what was supposed to be a triumphant moment for the Obama administration. The $400 million site's infrastructure was buggy enough during the initial rollout that deadlines for sign-ups have been extended again and again.

March 31 is the hard deadline for most people to sign up, but it's not the end of the line: Those who start an application by the end of the day today have until mid-April to request an extension, the administration recently announced.

Meanwhile, a bunch of providers told the Los Angeles Times that the enrollment exceeded their expectations. The paper estimated that about 9.5 million uninsured people are now covered under the law, including roughly 6 million who signed up on national and state health care exchanges.

You win some, Obama, you lose some.