THAT'S A WRAP, FOLKS.* Is OE3's big finish a bang or a bust?

*(mostly)

Well, it's around 7pm EST on Sunday, 1/31/16. As of this writing, HealthCare.Gov is loading quickly, as are all 13 of the state-based exchange websites. Aside from a "high call volume" message at Covered California and "extended call center hour" messages from CoveredCA and various other SBMs, I'm not seeing any evidence of website server load strain, etc.

In fact, the only site I know of to experience a significant technical snafu this weekend is the Washington Healthplanfinder, which was offline for most of yesterday (but has been up and running all day today).

In fact, the only "overtime/extension period" announcements so far are from the Maryland Health Connection and Covered California, which each announced official "In Line By Midnight" extensions for those who start their enrollment process by midnight tonight.

In short, this seems to indicate that everything is operating pretty smoothly. As for the actual volume, I've already concluded that the "final surge" will likely be decent but fairly muted compared to the first two years of Open Enrollment.

UPDATE 9:40pm: Ut-oh...this can't be good...

This is only appearing on the home page of the Massachusetts exchange website, but the wording of it suggests that it applies to all of the state-based exchanges.

Yeeks. Don't be surprised if there's a few more #ACAOvertime announcements after all....

UPDATE 10:50pm: Hmmm...it's been over an hour and no other state exchange websites are reporting any problems, nor have I seen any Tweets or Facebook posts which indicate any outages.

All websites including HC.gov are still loading smoothly.


UPDATE MIDNIGHT: Welp, that's that, at least for the Atlantic and Eastern Time Zones. *Central, Mountain West and Pacific still have a bit to go, and of course Alaska and Hawaii are 5 hours behind, but I've gotta get some sleep myself...

I assume there'll be some sort of rough tally announcement tomorrow, but all eyes will be on the Iowa Caucuses anyway, so there you go.


Once again, here's my final projection for OE3's QHP Selection Total; I assume the actual total will be announced tomorrow (at least to the nearest half million or so, anyway):

Advertisement