Officials don't plan to say how many people have successfully enrolled until next month. Obamacare figures leave a lot unsaid

About a half million people have taken the first step toward enrolling in Obamacare health coverage, creating applications on the exchanges, administration officials said late Saturday.

The “almost half million” figure the officials reported is the most complete national picture of President Barack Obama’s signature domestic legislation yet — but it still leaves a lot unknown or unsaid.


The figure is a snapshot of applications — the first step toward getting coverage. The administration isn’t planning to release until next month the number of people who have actually completed the process of choosing and enrolling in a health plan.

( POLITICO's guide to the Affordable Care Act)

Extensive “glitches,” as the administration has called them, with the online marketplaces known as exchanges have made it impossible for most people to get all the way through the signup process, even after filling out the initial online application.

At least 17 million have visited the site since it opened October 1, according to White House figures released earlier this week. The administration hopes to get 7 million people enrolled in coverage through the exchanges by the end of March, and millions more on Medicaid.

But the longer the computer problems persist, the harder it will be to meet that goal. To get covered by Jan. 1, people must enroll by Dec. 15. But they can still sign up for coverage until the end of March 2014.

Administration officials Saturday night would not release any information beyond the raw number of applications. President Obama plans to address health care at a White House event on Monday.

( POLITICO's full Obamacare coverage)

House Republicans, who had predicted for months that Obamacare implementation would be a “train wreck,” have scheduled the first hearings into the severe flaws in the computer system for this coming week. So far Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has declined to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

“As the news continues to get worse, it’s time for Secretary Sebelius to provide answers to Congress,” the committee said in a statement Friday.

There’s no consensus on how long it could take to get the system up and running correctly, and HHS isn’t saying. But given how rocky the launch has been, some health care experts say even these first-step application numbers show some promise.

“It strikes me as a very positive number, especially given how hard it was to get through the process on healthcare.gov and in some states. Presumably it would have been far higher if not for glitches and hiccups,” said Larry Levitt, senior vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

But he cautioned, “scorekeepers have always expected that early enrollees would be those who are sickest and most expensive, since they’ve been excluded from insurance until now. That is likely even more true given how hard the application process has been so far. It will be important to get the websites working smoothly to entice the young and healthy fence-sitters.”

Ron Pollack of Families USA, a health care advocacy group, said he found the early numbers encouraging, given how hard it is to get on the site. “It shows that interest is so high that half a million people persevered through the online glitches to start the official enrollment effort,” he told POLITICO. “It is clear that many millions of people understand that the Affordable Care Act will be very helpful for their families.”

To get covered, people have to create the application, shop and compare health plans, find out if they qualify for a federal subsidy and how much in total they would have to pay, and then actually select and enroll in a specific health plan. Millions of people have smashed into cyber-brick walls as they try to get through the flawed computer system which must process the information supplied by the applicant and check a massive “data hub” drawing on information from several massive federal agencies.

And even when people do manage to choose a plan, insurers and industry consultants say that the federal government is having trouble transmitting accurate and consistent data about who is signing up for which health plan. That indicates the online system has problems at the back end, not just at the consumer entry point.

Some of the barriers to that first step may be abating: reporters at POLITICO and other publications found it easier to get on the site in the last few days. But when they try to get deeper into the site, they encounter blank pages or other errors.

The Associated Press, which first reported the creation of 476,000 applications Saturday, said the numbers were roughly divided between people who had managed to create accounts on the HealthCare.gov federal site, which is serving 36 states, and the state-run exchanges. Neither White House nor HHS officials would give any further details or breakdown Saturday evening.

Several of the state exchanges, such as Kentucky and Washington state, are operating fairly smoothly. Some are still having problems, but overall the state-based systems are working better than the massive federal one. The health law as written in 2010 assumed that the states would run their own exchanges, with the feds only available as a backup. But many states, mostly with GOP governors, opted out, forcing HHS to build a far more massive and extensive enrollment system than it had contemplated, and Congress rejected several requests for additional implementation funds.

The Advisory Board, a business group that tracks health industry developments, tallied up the state figures available as of Friday and found that about 192,000 people had applied, and roughly 55,000 had selected a health plan (although not all of them had paid in advance for the plan, so technically enrollment wasn’t completed).

The gap between application and enrollment can’t all be blamed on technical problems; buying insurance can be complicated and experts had warned that people might visit the site and review their options several times, just like they do with other online shopping transactions.

Some state exchange problems also involve interaction with the federal system. Minnesota’s exchange executive director April Todd-Malmlov told a board hearing last week that the state system had to resubmit about 200 applications in the first couple of days because the Social Security Administration’s computer systems weren’t working properly. “There will likely be time when there’s one service or another that’s just down on the federal side, and we’re just going to have to resubmit things through,” she said.

— Dan Berman contributed to this report

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