The Obamacare online saga may be reaching the phase where media and political hysteria is out of proportion to the actual problem. A case in point is the controversy over enrollment numbers.

The Obama administration has not released figures for how many people have actually selected a plan and agreed to pay premiums. Officials have said they would do so after one month, since that’s the way government normally releases figures. But the administration has released other information, like the number of visitors to the site. Meanwhile, several states running their own sites have released their enrollment information. Reporters want to know why the federal government can’t or won’t do the same.

It’s a reasonable question. And I suspect the numbers will come out soon enough, if not because the administration announces them then because somebody leaks them. When they do, enrollment in Obamacare private plans will probably look pretty dismal. Most people will assume that's primarily because of website problems at healthcare.gov. They will be wrong.

The main reason for low enrollment will be that people don't sign up for health insurance programs right away. They wait until the last minute. This is true of public insurance and this is true of private insurance. And while you've heard people (including me) say this for months, this is one of those cases when numbers tell the story better than words. And there are some numbers very few people have seen.

The numbers are from Massachusetts, the state whose health reforms became the template for the Affordable Care Act’s coverage expansion. The place to look is within what’s known as the “Commonwealth Care” program, which is where people getting private insurance subsidies shopped for plans—in other words, an analogous structure to the new federally run exchanges.