Here’s the Latest on the Obamacare Website

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Right now is no time to come up short. It's time to fight like hell for a democracy where minority rule cannot impose an extreme and cruel agenda, where facts matter, and where accountability at the polls and in the press has a fighting chance. We have our work cut out for us, and we still need to raise upwards of 400,000 by June 30 to give it everything we can. Please help:

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Good news! HHS tweets: “FACT: In the first few days, very few could create an account on @HealthCareGov, we are now at an over 90% success rate.”

Bad news! Creating an account is nice, but apparently only about 30 percent can successfully complete an application.

Good news! “CMS spokeswoman Julie Bataille said that about half of the roughly 700,000 people who had completed applications [] came through healthcare.gov, which serves residents of 36 states.” And CMS claims that the website will be functioning smoothly for almost everyone by the end of November.

I dunno. Is this the kind of happy talk that’s common when teams are working to fix troubled programs? Or is it for real? And is the end of November soon enough to avoid a huge backlog of applications?

I’m not sure. But that’s the latest. If there’s a reason for caution, it’s this: teams that are fixing bugs are usually under enormous pressure to offer up the most optimistic date possible for getting the system working. This suggests that the end of November is the absolute earliest plausible date for getting the Obamacare website working well. Take it with a grain of salt.