Alex Adrianson highlights on the Heritage Foundation’s “Insider Online” blog an inconvenient fact for those who are unveiling new measurements for the Obamacare website: Those measurements mean nothing.

The Obama administration says Healthcare.gov will be a success “if 80 percent of users can buy health-care plans online,” report Amy Goldstein and Juliet Eilperin:

According to a government official familiar with the new target, the 20 percent who are unlikely to be able to enroll online are expected to fall into three groups: people whose family circumstances are so complicated that the Web site cannot determine their eligibility for subsidies to help pay for health plans; people uncomfortable buying insurance on a computer; and people who encounter technical problems on the Web site. [Washington Post, November 16]

But what does “80 percent of users can buy health-care plans online” mean? The new metrics are as clear as mud, says Megan McArdle:

The [Post] article says that the administration has related metrics for things such as lag time and the error rates in delivering pages, which imply that the answer is “80 percent of attempts will succeed.”

But then why would you lump “people who are uncomfortable buying insurance on a computer” into the group of people who won’t succeed? Presumably, something close to none of the attempts to use the website to buy insurance will be made by people who are uncomfortable buying insurance on a website.

“Eighty percent of total enrollees having gone through the site” is a pretty useless metric; the administration could theoretically satisfy this metric by getting five people enrolled: four on the exchanges and one through a paper application. […]

[I]t’s unlikely that the administration is measuring this directly; rather, they’d be constructing a model based on lower-level metrics such as … lag times and page-delivery errors. The nice thing about models is, of course, that they can be tweaked. All of which is to say that if the administration does not want to fail this metric, it won’t. [Bloomberg, November 18]