I can't speak to the states, but as a Canadian, my wife and I tried to tackle the communication problem together - it took us a collective 550 calls over the day to even make it to the "on hold" queue, and I'm pretty sure making into the queue was purely by luck - my wife continued trying and never got through. The system is completely overwhelmed.

That's a really good point. Even if a society technically has the resources to take care of everybody, a big disruption can still threaten access to it. As much as I'd like to see western/northern European countries as fairly well organised in this regard, government sites are crap everywhere.