In what should have been D-Day for Obamacare, it appears that the health exchanges have opened with a whimper rather than a bang. As my fellow Apothecary blogger, Josh Archambault, notes, technical bugs and errors have led to only a handful of states having their exchanges up and running on time: Colorado, Connecticut, D.C., Kentucky, Massachusetts, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

My colleague Yevgeniy Feyman and I did a quick survey on Healthcare.gov, and none of the federal exchanges are running either – anyone trying to purchase insurance on the federal exchange is (at least as of noon) receiving a message notifying them that they are overloaded with visitors and the website is down.

You’d think that one of the first and most basic tests of the federal exchange infrastructure would be to make sure their servers can take the traffic expected on the first day of the much-hyped launch of federal websites, so this is very disappointing and appears to vindicate critics concerns that the exchanges are really an unfinished product.

(In a bit of cosmic irony, Rockstar Games Grand Theft Auto V is also going online today, and also seems be very glitchy. My guess, however, is that the video-game maker – with a very active and vocal fan base – will fix their glitches faster than the government contractors can fix the exchanges.). . .