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About 20% of us are chronic procrastinators, though even more of us will delay when we really, really don’t want to do something.

And signing up for health insurance—a multi-step process of completing forms and checking boxes, filled with terms we don’t understand—probably qualifies.

So it’s no surprise that a flurry of customers spent Monday and Tuesday rushing to sign up for Obamacare health insurance plans that take effect on January 1, just hours ahead of a midnight deadline on Christmas Eve.

in recent days, the exchanges proved to be up to the challenge of dealing with huge traffic—and reported huge enrollment numbers as a result.

HealthCare.gov, the website that serves 36 state insurance exchanges, received a record 2 million visits on Monday, although officials haven’t yet said how many people signed up.

At least 750,000 people have used the federal exchange to sign up for coverage in December, the Washington Post reported this weekend.

Individual state exchanges also shared robust numbers ahead of their deadlines.

•California saw more than 25,000 sign-ups for private health insurance on Monday, the last day to buy coverage that takes effect on January 1.

•New York saw nearly 20,000 sign-ups on Monday. Since December 9, about 107,000 New Yorkers have signed up for private plans, more than the total number of sign-ups between October 1 and December 8.

Despite the surge in Obamacare enrollments, the slow start and technical problems across October and November means that the White House will likely miss its initial projections.

The administration anticipated that 3.3 million people would use the exchanges to purchase private plans that take effect on January 1; however, the latest available data from acasignups.net and my own tracking suggests that about 2 million had used the exchanges to sign up for private coverage through the weekend. http://www.forbes.com/sites/dandiamond/2013/12/25/obamacare-deadline-k
eeps-getting-delayed-even-as-enrollment-skyrockets/]

According to http://acasignups.net below: "Combined private plan enrollments plus Medicaid/SCHIP expansion = at least 5.75 million to date (does not include approx. 3.1 million young adults who have enrolled in healthcare plans via their parents accounts since 9/23/10 Source: http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/19/pf/healt-care-young-adults/";). That makes a total of approximately 8.8 million. Of course, there's the caveat that people have to pay their first premium for it to be set in stone, to be fair.

Basically: It's on.

(Interestingly, Connecticut has actually reached 103.03% of it's projected enrollment already, according to acasignups.net--yeah, it's only 34,000 against a projected enrollment of 33,000, but that's pretty kewl.)

The curve is kind of funny to look at: