Obamacare’s apologists have tried to blame Healthcare.gov’s failure on heavy load. We’ve known nearly since the beginning that this wasn’t true. But some new reporting reveals it isn’t even remotely close to true:
Days before the launch of President Obama’s online health insurance marketplace, government officials and contractors tested a key part of the Web site to see whether it could handle tens of thousands of consumers at the same time. It crashed after a simulation in which just a few hundred people tried to log on simultaneously.
Despite the failed test, federal health officials plowed ahead.
When the Web site went live Oct. 1, it locked up shortly after midnight as about 2,000 users attempted to complete the first step, according to two people familiar with the project.
The system can’t even handle a few hundred simultaneous users. A few hundred!
Moreover, although the load was somewhat high (but not all that high) during the first couple of days when people were trying the system out of curiosity (indeed, I tried it myself), it’s much lower now:
The number of visitors to the federal government’s HealthCare.gov Web site plummeted 88 percent between Oct. 1 and Oct. 13, according to a new analysis of America’s online use, while less than half of 1 percent of the site’s visitors successfully enrolled for health insurance the first week.
(Previous post.) (Via Hot Air.)
Internet Scofflaw 