The Department of Health and Human Services reported Wednesday ObamaCare enrollment is barely over 100,000 people, broadly including those who have selected a health care plan through the ObamaCare exchanges.
The administration had a goal to sign up a half-million people in the first month of open ObamaCare enrollment. Bot more than six weeks into the failed launch of HealthCare.gov and other state-based exchanges, HHS announced Wednesday that just 106,185 people had selected a plan as of Nov. 2.
The most important number falls even shorter than previous reports using insurer information, with just 27,000 — not 40,000 or 50,000 — who did so through the federal exchanges.
The release of the ObamaCare enrollment numbers had been highly anticipated, as both lawmakers and the media have been pressuring the Obama administration for weeks to release official figures.
“The marketplace is working, and people are enrolling,” Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius outrageously claimed while announcing the figures, adding that the numbers should grow “substantially” in the coming months.
But even the statistic released on Wednesday more than likely reflects numbers that have been inflated.
The administration said the ObamaCare enrollments number includes all those who have selected a health care plan from state and federal exchanges, even if they haven’t even paid a premium on those plans yet.
One source told Fox News that no one is truly “enrolled” until the insurance company knows about it.
The administration says a total of 975,407 applied for coverage and received an eligibility determination, but have not selected a plan. In addition to the 106,185 who have selected a plan, another 396,261 have been determined as eligible for Medicaid or a similar government program for children, tipping the ratio into dangerous territory.
When you dig further down into the numbers, however, problems with HealthCare.gov is not the full scope of the administration’s problem. Even though the Obama administration claims the website is being fixed, the data show only 27,000 people signed up through the federal exchanges, while the state-run exchanges, which use different websites, signed up just 79,000. Furthermore, more than half of ObamaCare enrollment sign-ups came from the states of California and New York.
The administration has vowed to correct the website problems by the end of November, but many experts are now on the record as saying the goal is unreachable, and privacy or security issues are being largely ignored.
