Turns out the law that worked in Massachusetts is working in California and will almost certainly work for the nations as a whole once the healthcare.gov website is fully functional. The latest data from California, the largest state in the nation, show pretty darn great numbers.
Krugman: "enrollment is surging. At this point, more than 10,000 applications are being completed per day, putting the state well on track to meet its overall targets for 2014 coverage....Equally important is the information on who is enrolling. To work as planned, health reform has to produce a balanced risk pool — that is, it must sign up young, healthy Americans as well as their older, less healthy compatriots. And so far, so good: in October, 22.5 percent of California enrollees were between the ages of 18 and 34, slightly above that group’s share of the population."
But the website is most definitely not working. Which is, after this long, really inexcusable and ridiculous and does highlight systemic problems with Federal government contracting and project management. But it will work eventually, I think there can be little doubt on that. Despite whatever incompetence is at work, it's still just a software application that's already been shown as completely feasible in the various state exchanges. So the eventual success of the ACA seems highly likely. The damage this debacle will do politically in the mean time may be pretty large.
Update: And this is what happened when I tried trouble shooting my problems with the site today with the "Live Chat" support feature. After a few minutes of a clueless guy asking me about pop-up blockers I got:
[12:17:19 pm]: No such user exists
[12:17:20 pm]: No such user exists
[12:17:20 pm]: No such user exists
[12:17:20 pm]: No such user exists
[12:17:28 pm]: No such user exists
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