There are two sides to the ill-fated rollout of the Affordable Care Act. The big one, the one we’ve all been hearing about, is the front end — the website. The bigger one, quite possibly, is the back end. It’s the plumbing of actually making sure people and their policies get matched up at insurance companies and at doctors offices. 

Robert Laszewski is president of the health care consulting firm Health Policy Strategy and Associates in Washington. He says that the troubles Americans are facing trying to sign up on Healthcare.gov are about to get bigger. 

“The bad news is that only a few enrollments are coming through to each insurance company a day — 10, 15, 20 enrollments. The good news is that’s so few they can actually spend the time cleaning them up and getting them right. The risk here is if the government opens up the front door before the backdoor is fixed, and now thousands of enrollments start coming in every day (and) some significant percentage are bad, they’re not going to be able to handle it.”