Obamacare's New Goal: Stay Alive Until 2015

So Nov. 30 has come and gone, the day that President Barack Obama promised HealthCare.gov would be up and working. And his administration says that the site is working, dramatically better than when it first went up. On the other hand, anecdata suggest slow enrollment. So what does it all mean? Is the website working? Is Obamacare saved?

To answer that, let's break down the details a bit. First, the good news: Compared with the chaos of October, the consumer experience is much better. It could hardly have gotten worse; for the first eight days, to a first approximation, no one could get coverage, and things were only marginally better by the end of the month. But the administration says that error rates have fallen dramatically, and the site can now handle 50,000 simultaneous users, where previously as few as 500 or 1,000 users would completely crash the site. In early November, the site was down more than half the time; now it has greater than 90 percent uptime. A source in the know tells Bloomberg that 100,000 people signed up in November, four times the pace of October enrollment.