Obamacare won't get 7 million enrollees in 2014

"Because HealthCare.gov has been under repair throughout November, enrollment will likely still lag well behind the pace needed to hit the bottom-line goal of signing up 7 million people by the end of March," reports the National Journal's Sam Baker. Baker's story, which is about how and whether we'll know when HealthCare.gov is fixed, is excellent. But I want to complicate the idea that signing up 7 million people by the end of March is really the "bottom-line goal" for Obamacare. The 7 million number isn't a goal so much as it's an estimate. It comes from the Congressional Budget Office's May 2013 projection of how many people would sign up for insurance under Obamacare.