A year ago today, I was endlessly hitting refresh on HealthCare.Gov. It was the Affordable Care Act's second day of open enrollment and nothing ... was ... working. The web site was down. The phone lines were jammed. But it wasn't just HealthCare.Gov. The federal government itself had shut down the day before, after Republicans, led by Sen. Ted Cruz, failed to defund Obamacare. It wasn't yet clear what was wrong with HealthCare.Gov — if anything. It seemed possible that the site had simply buckled under overwhelming traffic, and the outages actually foretold a successful launch. That turned out to be both very wrong, and very right.