One Possible Flaw with my QHP Projection Model...

Anyone who follows this site and The Graph regularly knows that I'm expecting a massive spike in enrollments this weekend and tomorrow (Monday)...possibly as many as an incredible 1.4 million nationally in just a 3 day period (370K yesterday, 380K today and potentially as many as an astonishing 650,000 tomorrow alone.

HOWEVER, even assuming that that many people try to log in and renew their current policy or switch to a different one (which I strongly advise), there's one snag: Sheer server capacity.

To the best of my knowledge, the highest load ever placed on HealthCare.Gov was on March 31st last spring, when upwards of 250,000 or so enrollments were processed in a single 24-hour period (for the record, the next 4 busiest dates at HC.gov included March 25 - 30th, April 1st, and December 23rd and 24th, which all make perfect sense).

Assuming around 75% of enrollments on any given day are added via the federal exchange, 650K total would mean around 480K via HC.gov...or nearly twice as many as the busiest day the site has ever experienced.

Can they pull it off? Beats me. I know they've beefed up the server capacity, load balancing, bandwidth, support staff, phone lines and so forth in anticipation of this weekend, so hopefully they're up to the challenge. I know that when my wife and I renewed our own policy yesterday morning (Saturday), things seemed pretty smooth overall...but we'll have to see.

Of course, the other possibility is that I've vastly overestimated how many people manually go in to renew/switch plans, and instead of the 2.9 million autorenewals that I'm expecting, it'll end up being more like 3.5 - 4 million. Either way, I'm still anticipating the grand total to be around 7.4 million by the time the dust settles on Tuesday morning.