Thankfully, it didn’t crash during the demonstration.

Via Bloomberg:

Reading between the lines a bit, I think that with 55 contractors and diffuse responsibility, the administration got into the kind of bad equilibrium that can affect big, unwieldy projects: Everyone was hoping that someone else would point out the obvious and say “We can’t go live by the deadline.”

A month earlier, on Sept. 5, White House officials visited CMS for a final demonstration of HealthCare.gov. Some staff members worried that it would fail right in front of the president’s aides. A few secretly rooted for it to fail so that perhaps the White House would wait to open the exchange until it was ready.

Yet on that day, using a simplified demonstration application, the Web site appeared to work just fine.