The Health and Human Services Department announced that the site would be shut down for 11 hours on Friday night to put those upgrades into place, on top of the usual four-hour timeout for maintenance on Saturday night.

Although the administration has postponed a December marketing campaign, fearful that the site would collapse under a surge in traffic, five weeks of repair work have clearly made the exchange better. From last Sunday to Tuesday, nearly 20,000 users managed to enroll in insurance plans, the most for a three-day period, according to people familiar with the project. By comparison, fewer than 27,000 users picked an insurance plan on the federal site in the entire month of October.

And pages that once took an average of eight seconds to load now show up in a fraction of a second. The rate at which a user sees an error message has also dropped from about 6 percent to 0.75 percent.

DAVID BROOKS: I have to say, people are appraising whether this government can work. Can government be nimble? Can it learn from its mistakes? And I would say the website is just a small symptom that is not nimble. Government is like an offensive lineman. It can do something really well. It can do blocking. It can create order. But when you ask government to be a wide receiver, then you're asking two things it can't do. And I think we're in a situation like that. We're asking it to do things it can't do. Republicans win elections when Democrats overreach by asking government to do things it can't do.

CHUCK TODD: David, the most interesting thing in this report, right, page one-- it's page three of the report, it says here that, "The team is operating with private sector velocity and effectiveness." Okay, that is an acknowledgement that, "You know what? If this was a government operation for a long time and it failed, now we're bringing in the private sector folks."

Rogers also voiced concern about chronically ill people now covered in high-risk pools who’ll be required to purchase coverage as those pools are ended at year end under the Affordable Care Act.

“We’ve broken the system to help a few,” he contended, arguing that many Americans are “absolutely apoplectic” about their health insurance policies being cancelled.

So the 15.4 percent of Americans Bush left uninsured in 2008 continued to rise in 2009 to 16.1 percent, then peaked at 16.3 percent in 2010. In 2011, it dipped to 15.7 percent, the biggest drop since 1999. The last census report showed that 48.6 million Americans were uninsured – that’s 15.4 percent. Exactly where it was in 2008.

It would be easy to credit the recovering economy for the rise of insured Americans — initial jobless claims last week were half of what they were when Obama took office. But the percentage of the uninsured is now lower than it was in 2006, before the Great Recession hit.

The New York Times‘ Paul Krugman calls the Affordable Care Act’s role in bringing health-cost growth to its lowest rate on record the law’s “secret success.” But the other secret success is how Obamacare is helping to reverse the growth of the uninsured population. This began in 2011 with children and young adults being able to stay on their parents’ plans until age 26, covering more than three million. And it continues this year with millions of Americans being added to the Medicaid rolls and millions likely to sign up for private plans, if the law’s health care exchanges begin working well enough.

“the security of this site” and its ability to safeguard health and income information “does not meet even the minimal standards of the private sector.”

He argued that Americans “should not tolerate the sheer level of incompetence securing this site. And remember how much personal information is not only there, but all of the (federal government data) sites that the (healthcare.gov) hub accesses would expose Americans’ personal information in a way that is breathtakingly bad.”

As the public face of Obamacare on the Web, the Healthcare.gov site theoretically represents a juicy target for politically motivated hackers to try to deface or even take down. Conservatives have tried just about everything else to stop the Affordable Care Act, including shutting down the government. Who’s to say that some activists wouldn’t resort to a denial-of-service attack or a Syrian Electronic Army-style takeover—especially on a day when the federal government itself grinds to a halt?

No one. The good news, however, is that there isn’t a whole lot of damage that can be done to that site per se, aside from inflicting some embarrassment on the bureaucrats in charge of it. In fact, far from being constructed as a walled fortress to keep attackers out, the site is notable for the openness of its design, as Alex Howard pointed out in a well-researched blog post earlier this summer. That’s because HealthCare.gov is mainly just there to provide people with information and direct them to the proper place, not to collect any sensitive data.

the most interesting thing in this report, right, page one-- it's page three of the report, it says here that, "The team is operating with private sector velocity and effectiveness." .