The Truth Comes Out: Obamacare's Website Enrolled A Grand Total Of Six People On Oct. 1
Avik Roy, Contributor
Forbes
11/01/2013 @ 1:34PM
There’s been a lot of spin coming out of the White House regarding the botched launch of Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges. When it was clear that people were having problems with the healthcare.gov website on its launch day, October 1, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius called it a “great problem to have.” The “glitches” were great, she said, because they were being caused by the overwhelming interest of millions of visitors to the website. But whenever she was asked how many people had actually enrolled in Obamacare insurance, she claimed she “didn’t know.” But now, thanks to a Congressional inquiry, we learn that she did know how many people enrolled on day one of the federal exchange: six.
White House memo: ‘Direct enrollment is still not working’
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.), obtained three memoranda from the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, or CCIIO, which set up the Obama administration’s “war room” on the exchanges’ launch. The first memo, from the morning of October 2, states that “6 enrollments have occurred so far with 5 different issuers.” By the following morning, total enrollments had increased to 248.
This confirms what insurance executives had told me, and others, on the day after the launch of the healthcare.gov website. “Very, very few people that we’re aware of have enrolled in the federal exchange,” one insurance official told the Washington Post. “We are talking single digits.” At the time, it seemed too crazy to be true. But it was true.
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