This week's Congressional Budget Office report really heated things up during an otherwise frigid week across the country.

As I mentioned yesterday, the latest CBO report which focused largely on the president's health reform law, dominated the headlines most of the day — whether it was about the shrinking federal deficit (which appears to undermine most Tea Party claims) or the labor cost of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (apparently widely misunderstood).

Oddly enough, what no one outside (or even inside) the industry seemed to notice was the huge hit the botched HealthCare.gov rollout seemed to inflict on the federal exchange enrollment forecast. To say the administration — and by extension, the media — glossed over the 1 million enrollment shortfall would be a gross understatement. We're talking about a 14 percent deficit of expected new enrollment right out of the gate just because the website used to run the thing came straight out of the dot-com bust.

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