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First Posted: 12/4/2013 Over the weekend, the Obama administration announced that it had met its self-imposed deadline to fix its balky health insurance exchange website for the &#8220;vast majority&#8221; of users. 
Federal officials crowed that the retooled website can handle 50,000 users at a time. But many more than that will likely flood in, particularly since they&#8217;ve had their individual policies canceled because of &#8220;Obamacare&#8221; mandates and they need coverage by Jan. 1. The deadline to sign up: Dec. 23. Three weeks.
Ominous sign that the system still isn&#8217;t ready for a massive influx of customers: Federal officials are not launching a planned December health care marketing campaign, lest too many users pile into HealthCare.gov and &#8230; bleep, blurp, bloop. We&#8217;re sorry, the website is currently unavailable. Please try again later.
The problem isn&#8217;t just with the sluggish response times to load pages. It&#8217;s in what happens in what insurers call &#8220;the back end&#8221; &#8212; after a customer chooses a plan and sends the application to the insurance company. Insurers need to verify the data, process the enrollment, send a premium bill.
How&#8217;s that working? Clunkily. No surprise there: Last month, Henry Chao, the HealthCare.gov project manager, startled lawmakers and insurers when he estimated that 30 to 40 percent of the exchange marketplace was still under construction.
Result: Insurers say they have been flooded with phone calls from people who believe they have signed up for a health plan, only to find that the company has no record of enrollment, The New York Times reports. 
The next three weeks are crucial. There will be a mad scramble to keep fixing a massively complex computer system while processing millions of sensitive personal documents. That&#8217;s not only about covering the uninsured. Millions of people who had individual coverage but lost it because of &#8220;Obamacare&#8221; need coverage starting Jan. 1. Many of them are still in limbo, their applications lost in the giant federal maze.
All the more reason for the administration to delay the mandate that Americans buy insurance or pay a penalty.
The White House already has granted businesses a pass on providing employees insurance or paying a fine.
How about an early Christmas present? Give everyone a pause on &#8220;Obamacare.&#8221;
Chicago Tribune

OTHER OPINION: ‘OBAMACARE’ Push pause button on new health law