Tech Troubles Slow Some State Exchanges

From The Wall Street Journal:

The Congressional Budget Office projected in May that seven million Americans overall would sign up for private coverage through new health-insurance exchanges by the end of 2014. Fourteen states and the District of Columbia are running their own health-care exchanges; the federal government is running HealthCare.gov in the other states.

The low enrollment numbers so far throw into doubt whether the exchanges will meet enrollment goals, particularly of healthy people, who are needed to offset the higher costs of insuring sicker residents.

California is being closely watched because it has the nation's largest population of uninsured people—about seven million of the state's 37 million residents, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Some states have reported large enrollment numbers, but those largely reflect enrollment in Medicaid, the federal-state program for low-income people, which was expanded by the health-care law.