My must read of the day is "Obamacare Exchanges Riddled With Glitches," in Time:
Exchange homepages in the 34 states where the federally government is fully or partially running insurance marketplaces included one of two messages this morning: "The System is down at the moment" or "Please wait." In a statement, the Department of Health and Human Services said that healthcare.gov had logged more than 1 million visits in just a few hours.
Many web sites run independently by states were also unusable this morning. New York’s exchange web site, nystateofhealth.ny.gov, at some points displayed an "internal server error" message. Exchange administrators blamed heavy traffic for the glitch, posting a message saying, "Due to overwhelming interest in the NY State of Health – including 2 million visits in the first 2 hours of the site launch – the health exchange is currently having log in issues. We encourage users who are unable to log in to come back to the site later when these issues will be resolved. Traffic may have been responsible."
You'll remember President Obama's many declarations, the most recent of them coming just yesterday, that signing up for the new health care program would be like using kayak.com.
If the program was as simple as "booking a hotel or a plane ticket," there would be no need to spend millions of dollars on "navigators" to assist individuals with registration.
Many people will argue that it's only been a day and these "glitches" will be sorted out. That may be true, and some of the technological issues will surely be corrected, but Obamacare was never going to be as simple as using an iPhone. And no one should have pretended otherwise.