Hello and welcome to This Day, a history show from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, October 2013, the Obama administration now in its second term, is putting the capstone on its signature achievement.

They had passed this massive

health care reform on which they'd expended much of their political capital, a years-long legislative

battle, and finally, Obamacare was here. And while they spent a lot of political capital, as I

mentioned, maybe they should have spent a little more actual capital on building the website

because almost immediately, healthcare.gov crashed.

Four million people tried to visit that website on that day to sign up for the exchanges.

And do you want to guess how many of those four million were able to successfully navigate

and sign up for health insurance?

Think about it. Try and guess, go lower,

folks. Go way, way, way, way. Six people successfully signed up on that very first day. So,

here to discuss the very rocky roll-up of healthcare.gov are, as always, Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt

and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there. Hello, Jody. Hey there.

We've been wanting to get this to this story for a long time. We all remember when this went down.

We remember the jokes and all that stuff. But it is a really fascinating kind of story. I think with

actually some lots of big lessons about how you frame and implement policy. But let's just go through the timeline here.

Obviously, you know, everyone, I think a lot of our listeners will remember the long political and

policy fight that led to the passage of the ACA, which gets passed in March of 2010. We're now here

more than three years later. But at some point along the way, Obama says this. And I'm

curious whether you feel like this is citing the bar too high. But he's talking about what we're

going to bring you, the website for the ACA. And he says, look, it's going to be real simple, a website

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