Does the ObamaCare website actually work now?

(Image credit: (Joe Raedle/Getty Images))

last updated 11 January 2015

After a two-month all-hands effort to fix Healthcare.gov, the White House announced over the weekend that the website will now work for the "vast majority" of consumers looking to purchase health insurance. The site reportedly can now handle 50,000 simultaneous users without crashing. That's a big improvement from October when as few as 500 users could cripple the site.

But how do we really know if the website works?

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But First Read points to two really good guideposts to gauge over the next two weeks if the website is truly better:

1. Are the insurance companies and government beginning to air their multi-million TV ad campaigns? They won’t do it if they don’t trust the website to handle the traffic.

2. Are skittish Democrats — especially those up for re-election next year in red states — a little less skittish than they were last month?

The political stakes are high because Republicans are running out of time to derail ObamaCare as more and more people sign up.

As Brian Beutler notes, after January 1, "a vote to repeal the law would transform from an abstraction into an attempt to snatch health insurance away from as many as several million people. That's a bad vote to take."

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Taegan D. Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political websites. He also runs Wonk Wire and the Political Dictionary. Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and COO of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. senator and governor. Goddard is also co-author of You Won â€” Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country, including The Washington Post, USA Today, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Christian Science Monitor. Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.