NEW YORK — About 550,000 people in Oregon do not have health insurance, and Aaron Karjala is confident the state’s new online insurance exchange will be able to accommodate them when enrollment under President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform begins on October 1.

What Karjala, the chief information officer at “Cover Oregon,” does worry about, however, is what will happen if the entire population of Oregon — 3.9 million — logs on that day “just to check it out,” he said. Or if millions of curious souls elsewhere, wondering if Oregon’s insurance offerings are better than their states’, log on, causing Cover Oregon to crash in a blur of spinning hourglasses and color wheels and an epidemic of frozen screens.

Multiply that by another 49 states and the District of Columbia, all of which will open health insurance exchanges under “Obamacare” that same day, and you get some idea of what could go publicly and disastrously wrong.

Obamacare, formally known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), could fail for many reasons, including participation by too few of the uninsured and a shortage of doctors to treat those who do sign up. But because its core is government-run marketplaces selling health insurance online, the likeliest reason for failure at the opening bell is information technology snafus, say experts who are helping with the rollout.

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