I know it’s been bandied about that there’s no low-hanging fruit left for the American economy, but what will the impact be job-wise if we end up having universal health coverage (or near-universal)? Will it create a large amount of employment opportunities and have residual positive effects on the economy? I have to think tens of millions of newly insured people will be a boon not only from a humanistic viewpoint but from a financial one as well. But I’m not an economist, so I can’t answer that. What I can tell you from my own experience of having worked for Internet companies is that it’s ludicrous to think that the rollout was bumpy because it was done by the public sector. The same thing happens regularly in the private sector. There are tons of IT workers in America, and most of them are mediocre at best. At any rate, it seems that many of the bugs in the ACA site have been worked out. From USA Today:

“WASHINGTON–The federal health exchange, Healthcare.gov, received 880,000 visitors Dec. 24, the last day people could enroll to receive health coverage on Jan. 1, officials say.

‘We’re going to do everything we can to ensure a smooth transition period for consumers whose coverage begins on January 1,’ Julie Bataille wrote in a blog Friday. Bataille serves as director of the office of communications for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. ‘And we’re going to continue to work to ensure every American who still wants to enroll in Marketplace coverage by the end of the open enrollment period is able to do so.’

Consumers have until March 31 to enroll on the health insurance exchanges to avoid paying a fine with their 2015 taxes for not having health insurance.

More than a million people visited the site over the weekend, and 600,000 had hit the page by mid-day Monday — the original deadline for Jan. 1 coverage.”