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Behind The Mic With Joe Mathieu: Last Minute Surge At HealthCare.gov

BOSTON (CBS) - It's frankly hard to believe when you think of where we were back in the Fall.

That's when Healthcare.gov was hobbled so badly by technical problems that some people just wanted to throw the whole thing out.

Deadlines were moved. Hearings were held. Fingers were pointed.

But here we are in April and the White House says it still managed to top the revised goal of enrolling 6 million people. And they say they're on the way to hitting its prior goal of signing up 7 million.

These numbers follow a surge of interest in the final hours before the March 31 deadline and they did not come without problems.

The site crashed twice Monday as hundreds of thousands of people all piled in at the same time.

But by the end of the day, White House officials reported more than 3 million people on the site. By the close of business yesterday about 207,000 applications had been started

These numbers could keep climbing. Officials say over 12 million applications have been initiated since the beginning of December. And of course those people have extra time to create new accounts because the deadline was moved for those in process.

By the way, a lot of people are asking about the Massachusetts exchange, which was also brought to its knees by tech glitches.

The state had already extended the deadline to April 15th but officials say they've still enrolled 265,000 people - more than the federal target enrollment number of 250,000.

Massachusetts already had a relatively low percentage of people without health insurance because this is, of course, where it all began. The state's universal health care law passed in 2006.

Follow Joe on Twitter @joemathieuwbz

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